Posts Tagged ‘Manhattan’

My Bookslut review of An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin was added to the amazing Lady Journos — dedicated to closing the byline gender gap!

Read my entire feminist critique of Steve Martin’s novel on Bookslut.

An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin’s latest novel about New York City’s art collecting scene begins in the early ’90s, and rapidly moves to 2010: Christie’s, Sotheby’s, downtown parties, and uptown apartments. Martin’s protagonist, the ambitious and savvy Lacey Yeager, arrives in New York, originally from Atlanta, with a penchant for art history. But from the beginning, Martin establishes that Lacey is not to be confused with other precious, fresh-faced 23-year-olds. Lacey is as aware of her beauty as she is of a Cezanne, and often uses her understanding of both to her professional advantage. She accepts a position as Sotheby’s, selling art by commission, and ascends her social climb from there, meeting everyone worth knowing and eventually developing a taste for “objects of beauty.” Lacey parlays her commissions into her own budding art collection, purchasing a small Andy Warhol before the value skyrockets some years later.

Claire Messud’s highly praised novel about the aimless wanderings of New York City’s young, intellectual, and elite is both humorous and emotionally engrossing. Messud’s three main characters met while studying at Brown University: Marina, the aspiring writer and daughter of an established literary icon, Julius, the perpetually temping Village Voice has-been, and Danielle, the studio-dwelling melancholy. Nearly ten years later, all three characters are approaching 30 with little to show for their Ivy League education, their developed opinions, and privilege.

Marina, the daughter of pretentious journalist and novelist Murray Thwaite, was offered a book deal at 23 to do an analytical study of children’s attire as a reflection of cultural attitudes. Seven years later, Marina has yet to make any progress on the book and flummoxes about her parents’ uptown apartment, contemplating getting a job but fearing that it would ultimately make her “too ordinary.” She attends parties on her father’s arm, defers to him on all things remotely literary, and generally invites the reader to implement a Freudian interpretation of their relationship at every turn.

Julius sleeps with his boss, moves in with him, then proceeds to destroy the relationship with a string infidelities. He too is jobless. Danielle spends much of her time at Marina’s house, catching up with the parents of her college friend as they still envision her as the over-zealous 22-year-old with a penchant for smart ideas. They hug her, pat her  on the head, and have her over for dinner often. But when Murray, Marina’s father, asks Danielle to meet him on the sly to discuss Marina’s crumbling literary career, Murray and Danielle fall into the throes of an illicit, borderline incestuous affair.

Messud is a detailed writer with a fondness, and a talent, for character portraits. In The Emperor’s Children, her protagonists are drawn out in outstanding detail; they could very well function as stories of their own regardless of the larger plot that unfolds. Her tendency to overwrite their personas, ticks, and quirks can be tedious at times, but does reflect a more traditional and time-honored approach to character description that goes absent from many contemporary novels. Messud’s voice is both charmingly chatty and uncompromisingly literary — a rare find, as well as nuanced. She captures many moments between her Woody Allen-reminiscent characters with fine overtones.

However, her comment on the unsavory intersection of privilege and intellectualism is resounding and clear. By weaving the stories of Marina, Julius, and Danielle together into a complex friendship of mutual entitlement and respective purposelessness, Messud offers readers an intricate peek into the downside to being young and brilliant.

To read more about Claire Messud, click here.

Sam Wasson’s book about the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s draws not just from the first day of film production but also from the lives and heartbreaks of Truman Capote, Audrey Hepburn, producer Richard Shepherd, screenwriter George Axelrod, and famed costume designer Edith Head.

Wasson opens the book with a close examination of Holly Golightly’s inception, studying Capote’s first brushes with glamor and disappointment as a child. Capote endures a troubled relationship with his mother, Lillie Mae Faulk, a wannabe socialite from humble beginnings who often leaves Capote with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. Capote’s mother often disappears to Manhattan hoping to rub elbows with the chic and elite but often comes back to Monroeville with little to show for her efforts.

According to Wasson, Capote internalizes his mother’s desperate dedication to metropolitan glamor and, as a result, develops close relationships with women who are cast from the same mold. While living in New York City, the dichotomy of youthful, small town sweetness and uptown sophistication fascinates Capote, and he entertains the idea of writing about his “swans” — delicate and troubled women who suffer under the social caste that they depend on.

After Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Jurow-Shepherd considers doing the book as a romantic comedy but Paramount Pictures is puzzled with how to market a New York City call girl with little regard for marriage, family, or love to wholesome American audiences. Producers grapple with how to alter Capote’s tale for the big screen: an openly gay narrator who describes Golightly’s loveless dalliances with rich men, her love of living alone, and her confession to being “a bit of dyke” herself after a few cocktails.

Producers pass on casting sex bombs like Marilyn Monroe and consider a sweeter actress to counteract Holly Golightly’s licentious lifestyle. Hepburn’s agent resists the script. Hepburn too feels that playing such a character will compromise her image. What ensues is a humorous and entertaining behind-the-scenes tale in which Head struggles to appropriately dress Hepburn’s slight form, Capote insists to the press that he could have written the script, and Blake Edwards, the director, demands real actors, not extras, for the famous party scene in Golighty’s apartment.

Wasson’s writing is vivid, lively, and effortlessly comedic as he resurrects scenes and phone calls between producers and writers with quick and snappy dialogue. Wasson’s detailed descriptions of shooting locations and between-the-scenes moments are recreated with a reserved amount of fiction, moving reported events along with novel-like ease. His literary use of Hepburn, Capote, Monroe, and Axelrod read like finely drawn biographical sketches — as if they are  fiction characters of his own making.

Impeccably researched, Fifth Ave, 5 a.m. presents a peek into 1960s cinema but also, as the title promises, the beginning of modern women in film. Wasson consistently contrasts Audrey Hepburn, devoted mother and not-so-appreciated wife, with her party girl role, producing a thoughtful meditation on the Madonna/whore schism. He takes note of the sexist utilization of the term “kook” in the press to soften Holly Golighty’s image and the strategic placement of the cat on Hepburn’s shoulder for the promotional poster.

… that cat, which was so important to the studio was — as their explicit definition indicates — part of their spin on ‘kook.’ Without it, the figure of Holly in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster reads as simply seductive. The presence of the cat quite cleverly plays against that potentially alienating feature — and here’s the key — without negating it… Breakfast at Tiffany’s is kookie, the poster says, but the good kind, the kind with an old-fashioned ending.

Wasson’s analysis of women’s sexuality in the 1960s includes interviews with women who were mini Golightys before the fame of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Their anecdotal stories, along with comments drawn from reviews of the film, reveal the impact Breakfast at Tiffany’s had on depictions of women in the media. Beautifully, he describes how America responded to the progressively themed film that predated the turbulent 60s:

Back then, while the sexual revolution was still underground, Breakfast at Tiffany’s remained a covert insurgence, like a love letter passed around a classroom.

Fifth Ave., 5 a.m. is well-rounded in its reach and study of many topics, facts, and people. The stories of Breakfast at Tiffany’s individual participants could suffice as vignettes of their own, but Wasson brings each of them together in close observation of the film that they’ll each be remembered for.

To read more about Sam Wasson, click here.

Carlene Bauer’s debut book, Not That Kind of Girl, details her evangelical upbringing in a small, cloistered town in southern New Jersey. Indoctrinated into her nondenominational faith by well-intentioned parents, Bauer and her younger sister struggle with eventual integration into public school, religious questioning, and general adolescent turmoil. Bauer eventually leaves her small pond for a slightly larger one: a private Catholic college. She majors in English and  “communes with the dead,” spending hours poring over Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Simone de Beauvoir. Bauer eventually moves to Brooklyn where she tries to reconcile her belief in God with a hunger for sex, love, and other experiences beyond the conditions of her faith. Bauer passes into her twenties with little to no sexual experience, without any tales of drunken debauchery to share at the local dive bars in which she feels out of place. She yearns for a boyfriend but can’t seem to develop a full-fledged romance; she refers to her suitors as “false starts.”

Bauer is articulate in her religious contemplation, communicating her experiences of doubt and illumination with eloquent and lucid prose. She observes her small town well, recalling the details of youth groups and high school social politics, discerning her own visceral reactions to the reckless behavior of her peers with evocative and arresting perception. Upon hearing stories of drunken escapades by friends at the edges of town, Bauer fears losing control of herself in the typical high school party setting:

The word party, because of how I’d overheard them described and seen them depicted in John Hughes movies, filled me with fear. I was afraid of what people would see if I let myself go wherever my mind and alcohol and drugs would take me. I didn’t want anyone to ever have to step over me while I lay openmouthed like a fish that had been knocked from its bowl onto somebody’s parents’ shag carpet. Or pull my face, mottled with vomit and mulch, out of somebody’s parents’ landscaping after I’d heaved in the bushes. I didn’t ever want anyone who wasn’t related to me to see my body’s secrets spilled out in strangers’ ranch houses when I wasn’t even sure what its secrets were.

The themes of Bauer’s work stand strong: feminism, literature, and religion. A budding feminist in her religious community, she gravitates towards the writings of Sylvia Plath, looking to the late poetess for inspiration as she plans a life for herself in New York City. Her dedication to classic literature is matched only by her love of God, a relationship that is beautifully entwined in Bauer’s introspective narration.

Bauer writes keenly about female friendship, exposing delicate moments in the lives of ambitious young women whose faith eventually dissipates. Each of her female comrades is finely drawn as they travel, give up God, and meet up with Bauer some years later in different settings and with new attitudes. Warned from an early age to steer clear of teen pregnancy, drugs, and hair dye, she unexpectedly becomes close with rebel and chronic smoker Caroline. Bauer describes their polar opposite nature with fondness, writing, “I thought girls as different as we were had to circle each other with suspicion, but she came over and pulled me to her.” She identifies the friendship as a “sisterhood,” explaining humorously that, “we might have recognized men as the oppressor, and raged against them in the abstract, but we could be charmed by individual cases.”

Not That Kind of Girl suffers from a lackluster ending, but Bauer’s bow to convention does not detract from this indubitably well-written memoir, an observant and reflective work in a recent boom of mediocre memoirists. This contemplative meditation on identity and God from an analytical, well-read, and self-professed “good girl” announces a promising Brooklyn-based writer with insights worth reading.

To read more about Carlene Bauer, click here.