Review: Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn’t even know Woody Allen was writing a memoir until I read in the news a few months ago that Ronan Farrow had taken to Twitter to denounce the project and its alleged lack of factchecking, rekindling in the media for the umpteenth time the decades long bloodfeud between the eighty-five year old multi-hyphenate filmmaker and what could loosely be termed his family. Stating that he was unaware, while working on his much acclaimed nonfiction bestseller, Catch and Kill, that a relationship existed between the publishing house and his estranged father, Farrow decried Hachette’s “lack of ethics and compassion for victims of sexual abuse” in pursuing the project and cited this “breach of trust” as a factor in his decision to part ways with the publisher. I got the same uneasy feeling I always do when someone mentions Woody Allen in the media—a momentary lurch of excitement (he’s one of my favorite directors) followed by a chastened feeling that I shouldn’t be excited (he’s the center figure in a messy child abuse allegation that continues to play itself out in the media lo, these many years later, with no real resolution in sight). After an employee walk out in protest of l’affaire Allen, Hachette folded and announced that they were no longer publishing Apropos of Nothing, as it was titled, returning the rights back to the author. Well, hell, I thought. I wonder what was in the book. Days later, I found an article on DailyMail using some of the more salacious portions of the Allen autobiography as pull-quotes—wait, how did they get a hold of this? Turns out, Arcade Publishing picked up the title and quietly released it in print and a number of e-platforms two weeks after Hachette cancelled his contract. I dutifully plopped down my $9.99 for the Kindle edition and there it sat in my queue for a few days before I plucked up the initiative to read it. Would it be awful, justifying Ronan Farrow’s public criticism? Would it be wonderful, highlighting the injustice of trial by media? Which was worse?

In a way, Apropos of Nothing meets both of my very different projections. Allen tackles the subject of his life story with characteristically mordant humor, covering his childhood in Brooklyn and his miraculous ascent from wunderkind comedy writer to stand up comedian to acclaimed auteur filmmaker in you-were-there detail. The first two hundred pages or so are as immersive, interesting, and witty as anything in his motion picture catalog, peppered with Woody-isms (“I’m eighty-four, my life is almost half over” was a good one) and well-employed but performatively florid vocabulary (“cynosure” comes up twice in the text, if that gives you any idea of what I’m talking about, when “envy” would have been perfectly serviceable both times). There’s a page or two devoted to exposing ellipses or idiosyncrasies in his knowledge/taste as a moviegoer (the man has never seen Wuthering Heights or Now Voyager and “loved” Irene Dunne but only “enjoyed” Carole Lombard, which just blew my mind). He takes special care to describe his relationship with troubled actress and second wife Louise Lasser, and though he does mention at length his brief affair and lifelong friendship/working relationship with the fabulous Diane Keaton, it’s more guarded and less candid (not kiss-and-tell, just candid) than you’d hope for in a book about his life. I have no complaints for the entire first half of the book, or if I do, they’re very, very minor. I felt like I was listening to an old friend talking, and hung on every word. It’s when Allen gets into his association with and subsequent dealings surrounding Mia Farrow that things go off the rails.

As I said, I spent the first two hundred pages of the book going, “It’s a travesty this almost didn’t get published, this is one of the best books I’ve read about being a young comedian in New York in the fifties’ and sixties’. So fascinating! So forthcoming with the details!” When Mia Farrow enters the picture, the keen eye for storytelling goes right out the window, and what follows is a seemingly interminable rant about the miscarriage of justice that he insists occurred at the abrupt end of his personal involvement with Farrow and beginning of the notorious relationship that has seen him into his twilight years. You’re probably familiar with the story of Woody Allen leaving Mia Farrow for her twenty-two year old daughter, Soon-Yi, and subsequently facing a firestorm of press coverage over allegations that he sexually molested his adopted seven year old daughter, Dylan. This section of the book, though I knew it was coming, was difficult for me. Regardless of who did what, I struggled with the relentless vilification of Mia Farrow (and occasionally her children) that dragged on for pages, and pages, and pages, and pages. Mia has a troubled family history, including a brother in prison as a convicted pedophile. Mia was erratic, impulsive. Mia locked one of her kids with a disability in an outbuilding overnight as punishment for something trivial. Mia neglected her kids, ignoring some and favoring others depending on her whim. Mia was verbally abusive. Mia hit Soon-Yi with a phone (back when phones were big, heavy, landline affairs). Mia coached her kids to say things happened that didn’t to exercise control over and discipline them, an abusive behavior that Allen says culminated in her alleged coaching of Dylan to describe the molestation he maintains never happened in any way, shape, or form. Allen quotes extensively from a recent piece written by Moses Farrow, the only pro-Woody supporter among Mia’s children, and incorporates statements from the two (two!) child abuse investigations that took place in the early 90’s. Even if every single accusation Woody Allen makes about Mia Farrow was factual and not seemingly partially-true, partially the product of almost thirty years of being deadlocked with Farrow in this ugly deathmatch bent on personal annihilation, it still feels slimy to wade through this constant mudslinging. It gets tedious after, say, fifty pages of him circling the same subject (“didn’t do it, look how crazy Mia is, how on earth can people not see my innocence”, ad infinium). As in Mommy Dearest’s treatment of Joan Crawford, there’s no “person” there in his description of Mia Farrow, just a relentless bogeyman with no motivation other than the senseless destruction of her ex’s life. In rendering Farrow two-dimensionally evil, he weakens his own credibility, and in perseverating on the subject of his total blamelessness in this section, you feel like you don’t want to believe him as much as you would had he explained what happened and continued in the same even handed vein as the first section of his book. I feel like if the book had been properly edited and not come out under cloak-of-darkness as this notorious subject, a good editor would have made Allen either make his point about “his side of the story” and not keep getting licks in at the expense of his audience’s increasing discomfiture, or somehow shaped this section into something more revealing than an endless polemic on how wronged and innocent-above-all-things he is. I like him (in spite of myself) and came out liking him less for this giant hunk of the book being about settling scores more than telling the story of what happened to him during this explosively contentious period of his life.

The rest of the book is patchy and never regains the momentum of the first half—Allen describes people he knows or worked with in a disinterested string of adjectives and glides over his movie output with the shorthand of whether or not it was well-received, whether or not it made any money, whether or not it was a hassle to make. Anecdotes are weak at best. There are a few tidbits here and there (Michael Keaton was originally cast as the lead in one of my favorite Woody Allen movies, the magical-realism steeped Purple Rose of Cairo, but Woody found him “too contemporary” to fit the 1930s matinee idol part—he was replaced by Jeff Daniels), but for the most part, it’s almost like “well, I came and said what I had to say, let’s wrap this up”. Barely any mention of his two children in his marriage with Soon-Yi except that he has them and they’re in college. Soon-Yi is aggressively described as “bright and witty” but we get very little sense of her as a person so much as a cause throughout the book. Talk about a let-down. I didn’t need a tell-all, but I would have appreciated a “tell-some”. I felt like I was rewarded for having slogged through the middle part with this half-hearted, blasé denouement that left me very, very confused as to whether or not I could say I “liked” the book. Again, if you asked me two or three hours in, it would have been a RESOUNDING yes. After the Mia Farrow hit job and the wishy-washy final fifty pages, including these almost chidingly written passages about his recent public woes related to an Amazon deal gone south and several actors distancing themselves from him during the MeToo movement, I can’t say I overall recommend the book. If you can, read the first 200 pages and when you see things turning for the worse, go ahead and bail. I kind of wish I had. I can’t say the book diminished my esteem for him as a tireless creator of finely made, sensitively wrought movies, but as a writer and a person, he may have lost some points with me.


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Review: Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Ghost Wall" had a beautiful cover and a constant flashing banner advertisement on the Lit Hub website, so when I saw that my library’s online collection had a copy, I said let’s give it a whirl. And what a whirl. Even at a brief 152 pages, this book flies by so quickly and is so densely packed with forceful writing that it feels less like a snack and more like a meal. While it had every opportunity to skew YA fiction rather than adult lit (teen protagonist, forays into bildungsroman style flashbacks), the tone of this novel is as mature as blue chip stock. I LOVED it, even as I was unnerved by some of the behaviors of the characters and eventually shocked by the denouement. Good shocked, but shocked.

The story is told in first person from the perspective of Silvie, a twenty-first century teenager on an Iron age re-enactment trip with her parents, an archaeology professor, and a handful of students from a local university. The group is living in an encampment in the English countryside and attempting to follow ancient folkways practiced by the Britons in the time period—hunting and foraging for food, wearing long itchy tunic shifts over bare feet, sleeping in a communal hut, cooking by a fire. Silvie’s father, Bill, is not an academic, but an almost obsessive amateur enthusiast, who has dragged his family along for the experience. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that Silvie’s normal life is not all that normal, lived in the shadow of her physically abusive, emotionally manipulative father and a cowering, complacent mother. Her parents’ behavior on the trip mirrors their home dynamic, just with even less places for Silvie to go to escape the scrutiny and the threat of discipline. She makes quasi-friends with one of the college students, a free-spirited girl named Molly who questions many of the strictures placed upon them for the immersion experience, sneaking off to a gas station when the mood strikes her to get some very non-period junk food snacks. Molly’s confidence and carefree attitude seem to both attract and frighten Silvie, who worries constantly about “getting in trouble” even when no one is watching or should care. Something about the idea of Silvie seeing a possible version of herself, stripped of the worry and doubt that comes with being under the thumb of a domineering, abusive parent, in Molly is very touching at the same time as it is very sad.

I was interested in some of the class differences explored in the book— the parents speak in a strong Mancunian accent from the north of England which seems accurately reproduced in the book without feeling like you’re wading through a soup of regional dialect. Silvie several times mentions the students’ accents as “sounding posh” as if they were somehow putting on in a way that Silvie and her parents were not, and Molly at one point makes a stab at imitating Silvie’s mother’s accent, which is not well received by Silvie herself. The students all seem relatively disinterested in their studies in spite of the opportunities they’ll afford them as university graduates, while Silvie mentions that she doesn’t see a point to going to university, and will probably just start a job after she finishes high school. Silvie’s father’s place in the field trip, as a lower working class, weekend aficionado of the armchair variety rather than a practicing professional, leaves him open to a kind of posture-off with the actual professor on the trip, and you can’t make out if the blustering is part of Bill’s bullying personality or an effort to establish his authority on the subject despite his lack of formal education. A particularly telling exchange happens when he brings up an obscure Celtic warrior queen in the midst of a historical discussion and the professor corrects Bill’s pronunciation before responding. “Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems a more accurate rendition.” What a pill, I thought. The man drives a bus five days a week and somehow still finds time to know as much as you do about something you have a terminal degree in, Professor Whateveryournameis. But I digress.

As the book progresses, you can almost feel a knot tightening in your stomach, as nothing so much about the circumstances but everything about the voice and style of the writing points to dread. I remember being shocked/weirdly thrilled by this sentence in the second chapter, which is casually dropped in between some lines about the roughly built period-correct shelter: “Some of the Iron Age people kept their ancestors’ half-smoked corpses up in the rafters, bound in a squatting position, peering down empty eyed. Some of the houses had bits of dead children buried under the doorway, for luck, or for protection from something worse.” Well! This macabre tidbit gives you good idea of some of the tone of the book, which in some sections has the eeriness of a dream coupled with the banality that comes with spending a large portion each day walking the countryside searching for edible berries or setting traps for rabbits… the days seem as boring as they are surreal, in a way, each action or plot point strangely seems to anticipate the next. Also, the frequent references to the bog bodies—human cadavers that become mummified by peat bogs and are present an invaluable resource to the archaeological/anthropological community in reconstructing the lives of Iron Age (and later) peoples—don’t really do anything to lighten the aforementioned kind of ghastly vibe. The story is semi-haunted with the idea of death and brutality of a time period long since passed.

The book builds to a climax which, as I said before, makes sense in the context of the story but is shocking in its execution—I won’t spoil it for you, but get ready for weird to meet weird to meet unreasonably weird. I thought at the beginning of the book I might like to go on a similar field trip and experience what it was “really like” during such a different time period, but I now decline any going offers, thanks the same. If you’re looking for sensitive, incredibly well crafted storytelling with a sidecar of can’t-put-your-finger-on-it apprehension, "Ghost Wall" is your book.


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Review: In the Dream House

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” is technically a memoir, but don’t expect to open to the table of contents and detect a linear path from Machado’s childhood to her current status as happily married graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. What Machado has done with this book is a truly expert level of deconstruction, to both the story of her own tortured love affair that forms the basis of the book and the structure of memoir itself. I was equal parts intrigued and delighted by her efforts and if you’re at all interested in the subject, you will be too.

Sectioned off into one page, one paragraph—sometimes one sentence—long gulps of prose, the book is formatted into capsules titled “Dream House as _____” (Dream House as Epiphany, Dream House as Lesson Learned). Each title is a wry statement on the subject of the confession, criticism, recollection that follows, lined with witty footnote references to fairy tale tropes. The capsules piece together and pore over the details of a relationship Machado had in her twenties’ and the nightmarish psychological and verbal abuse that accompanied it—the tense feeling of dread you get as she falls in love with a beautiful girl who adores her, and as that girl gradually becomes a monster, is as unnerving as an actual horror story. Yet, because it’s real life, there are horrible moments followed by mundane ones, and peaks of ridiculousness (arguments that start over nothing and end with Machado literally having to lock herself in a bathroom away from her girlfriend like Shelley Duvall in The Shining) followed by plateaus of semi-normalcy. The book gives you a teeth-clenchingly realistic idea of what it is like to be in the slow boil of non-physical abuse—because Machado’s girlfriend never hits her, and because Machado truly wants to hang on to the relationship and the love and acceptance she’s found in it, she thinks she can manage her behavior and change her reactions enough to make the girlfriend stop losing her everloving mind on Machado for such tiny indiscretions as “falling asleep while watching a movie with her roommates and not immediately answering her girlfriends calls”. As any survivor of this kind of a relationship could tell you, it was never about the unanswered calls, and it would never not be about SOMETHING.

Taking advantage of the dip and dive of the story structure, Machado incorporates everything from literary and film criticism (discussing Ingrid Bergman’s performance in Gaslight, for example, a movie that lends its name to the current psychological term for being manipulated into questioning your sanity by someone for their own gain) to research into the issue of underreported domestic violence among lesbian women into her narrative. To the latter point, I thought of just how many heterosexual, male-on-female stories of violence there are in mainstream literature, news headlines, etc—how the battered-by-a-man battered woman is a familiar trope in books and media. Conversely, I had trouble trying to think of a famous case of a lesbian relationship shaded by violence (though Machado brings up several in an insightful section on historic cases of female-on-female abuse or murder). She goes on to consider how personhood, and the right to even BE in a public or legal binding relationship, is such a comparatively new concept in the lesbian community that the more nuanced, and even negative, views of members of this group have yet to come to popular acceptance. Hopefully, with this book and with the encouragement of other voices from people with similar experiences, that will begin to change.

By telling her story in such a rivetingly original way, Carmen Maria Machado has created with In the Dream House both an intensely personal and a compulsively readable account of her attempt to “make sense” of a love affair gone wrong, and a thought-provoking meditation on the idea of the way in which a fairy tale romance can turn into a nightmare. Once I started reading it, I had to stay up to see what happens, and if that isn’t the highest form of praise an author can get from me, I don’t know what is. Check it out.


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Review: Romance in Marseille

Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up “Romance in Marseille” based on some buzzy reviews from LitHub and New Yorker—a lost classic from a giant of the Harlem Renaissance? Sign me up, man. After reading several pop lit titles in a row, I have to say Claude McKay’s writing was like a cool drink of water— I was a little worried that something pulled out of the archives unfinished after ninety years might have languished in obscurity for a reason, but I could put those fears to bed within the first five pages. This is a GREAT book. I don’t know that that it quite lives up to the breathless hype of the reviews, but it was a wonderful introduction to the work of a truly talented author and a brisk read at 90ish pages.

"Romance in Marseille" opens with the amputation of protagonist Lafala’s lower legs and feet, which, way to start the book off with a bang. Originally from West Africa, Lafala was discovered as a stowaway on a French freighter bound for New York—the shipmen punitively locked him in an unheated lavatory for the remainder of the voyage, resulting in frostbite to his feet and their subsequent amputation. It says something about “what we’ve come to expect from protagonists” that I already started wondering if this was some kind of device, where Lafala might wake up and realize it was all a dream, but no, he actually goes through the entire book as a double amputee, and that’s one of the really interesting parts of this novel. In the (unnecessarily voluminous) introduction, there’s a quote from McKay about how he wanted to treat Lafala’s disability without the usually heavy strings and maudlin overtones. Lafala, soon outfitted with prosthetic limbs and crutches, is no Tiny Tim--thanks to an enormous settlement from the ship’s owners, he becomes attractive in his affluence and more envied sans feet than he was with them. While the subject of his legs is never all the way out of sight, it’s treated with a distinct lack of pity and so much more naturalness than the usual writer from this time period would handle a similar situation.

After winning his lawsuit, Lafala returns to the port of call he initially stowed away from—Marseille. He picks back up with a prostitute, Aslima, who stole all his money the last time he was in town and instigated his departure in the first place. She has a change of heart towards him in his newly disabled state, feeling partially responsible for his misfortune, and refuses to take money from him like her other clients—they begin a kind of is-she-or-isn’t-she-going-to-rip-him-off-again pas de deux, a situation triangulated by Aslima’s white pimp, Titin. At the local café, Tout-va-Bien, a colorful assemblage of misfits pass in and out of focus— there’s a feeling of a more diverse, more French version of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, as gay and straight, black and white, middle class and poor figures mingle. Some of this gets a little too character-sketchy, where the flash portraits of new people get in the way of the narrative, which is essentially a story of Lafala and Aslima, but I think some of this could be chalked up to the book not being “finished” by McKay before its way-posthumous publication.

My only real complaint with the book is the long, long, LONG introduction and the EVEN LONGER and even less useful explanatory notes presented in this edition. The introduction gives a bit of an overview of the history of the manuscript, contextualizes the idea of the “stowaway” narrative, draws connections to possible real life inspirations used by McKay to form the backbone of the novel and some of its characters, and presents some ideas on how forward thinking the themes were for their time. I appreciated being clued in on these concepts but it felt stretched for length and overly pedantic. What I said about the intro goes twice for the explanatory notes—I mean, it would be useful to know that a muezzin is a term for the person who recites the call to prayer in a mosque, but can I not Google that? Did they have to explain what a Morris chair is? Spoiler: it’s an Arts and Crafts movement style chair designed by William Morris—not that that has hardly any bearing on the narrative, it’s just a descriptive term used for a chair you would see in the time period of the book. It felt a little like the notes at the end of a Shakespeare play, where you really would be lost if you didn’t understand a particular Renaissance-era reference or word, except this is the 1920’s and you won’t die if you don’t know what a pianola is…you can infer based on the context that it’s some kind of musical instrument, and I didn’t really need them to tell me it was “a type of mechanical player piano, introduced in the 1880s, that lost ground to the gramophone beginning in the 1920’s.” I already knew that from reading a lot of books from the 1920’s, but if YOU didn’t, YOU would be fine, trust.

Short and long of this—skip the introduction until after you've finished the book, skip the explanatory notes altogether, and dig your teeth into this lushly written novel by a somewhat forgotten, but hopefully not for much longer, voice of early 20th century African American literature.

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