A Needed, Avuncular Voyage

 

avuncular - adjective - like an uncle; careful, heedful

Sometimes it is unsteadying to reach a certain milestone in life and then look back at the past, as the tendency is to compare what was then to what is now. If you are 65 or over and gaze back over your shoulder about fifty years, the differences between then and now are so extreme that they could make you dizzy. Although I make a conscious effort to live in the present, occasionally I drift back into the past when prompted. 

The other day, a gentleman whom I met recently suggested that I watch an oldie but goodie, Carl Reiner's black comedy "Where's Poppa?" (1970, United Artists) on a streaming service. Since the film's cast is topnotch (George Segal, Ruth Gordon, Ron Leibman, Trish Van Devere, Rob Reiner, and Vincent Gardenia), I could not say no. If you are brave enough to follow my lead and take a walk on the unwoke, wild side, make sure you are safely ensconced on a couch for the entire duration so that you don't get a quick case of vertigo from the experience of watching. After having gotten used to a sanitary, woke world, to take in scenes of the opposite got me reeling. Nothing, believe me, nothing about this movie is remotely politically correct. If writer Robert Klane were to attempt to submit his screenplay to any production companies today, he would be laughed out of Hollywood. Cancelled indefinitely. 

In case you are too scared to take the plunge, I'll spill the beans re: the contemporary atrocities in a work wherein cultural stereotypes abound. Warning: there is no subgroup that is not satirized. To start, Jewish men, their wives, and their mothers are ridiculed: Ruth Gordon, a brilliant character actress, plays the insufferable Mrs. Hocheiser, demented mother to forcibly avuncular George Segal (lawyer Gordon) and Ron Leibman (henpecked Sidney). She has them both shackled to their dying father's wish, not to put their impossible mother into "a home," the only sane solution to the problem. George bends over backwards to get her into an early grave, including buying and then wearing a gorilla suit in order to scare her to death. When he meets the love of his life, angelic Louise (Trish Van Devere), a caregiver who answers Gordon's ad for help with mom, he loses patience and informs his brother Sidney (Ron Leibman) that he will throw Mom out of the window if he doesn't take her off his hands. Despite the protests of Sidney's unsympathetic wife, he answers the call but must first go through Central Park after dusk before he can get to Gordon's apartment. While in Central Park, he is accosted by ruffian rapists and muggers (all played by African American male actors, which would NEVER fly today) not once, but twice. Fragile, malleable Sidney himself is forced by the unlawful gang to "rape" an off-duty, gay police officer dressed as a woman who doesn't not press charges, claiming the encounter was one of the passionate highlights of his life, icing the cake that is his infatuation with red roses. There are other subgroups that are criticized, namely American military officers who are depicted as austere, profane, immoral warmongers capable of genocide. Naturally, the film is an unforgiving, biting satire at which audiences laughed only to realize that '70s society needed to change drastically.

And somehow at some point it did a 180. Today, nothing is politically incorrect, nothing is satirized for fear of reprisal, cancellation on social media. Very few have the audacity to take pot shots at what is wrong with society today, even comedians are kept at bay. So it all comes down to us being left to take an honest look at what is going on around us and make a few alterations. "Where's Poppa?" of the 1970s may very well segue into "Where's Sanity?" in the 2020s, a needed, avuncular voyage.

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Is LESS More? (a book review)

 

spoony - adjective - foolish, tenderhearted

Andrew Sean Greer's celebrated Less (Back Bay Books, 2017), a gay take-off on Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, features forty-nine-year-old Arthur Less, a self-deprecatory, "spoony,"gay author who attempts to solder heartbreak by traveling the world to fulfill long-overdue literary obligations (and a suggestion made at a poker game). Greer's voice has a unique flair, belting the reader with one bizarre metaphor or simile after the next, humorous on occasion as some of the farfetched comparisons are so exaggerated and incongruent that the reader can't help but collapse into guffaw at the absurd imagery projected. 

The hard truth is that the unsympathetic protagonist, Less, is, more or less, not likable. He comes off as a stereotype of a gay man: eternally lonely, weak, promiscuous: a fool for beautiful young boys or famous, older mentors. Ironically, at one point, his homosexual writer colleague criticizes him for denigrating the community by composing a minimally successful modernization of Homer's The Odyssey via his Kalipso! about a bi-sexual Odysseus trapped in hedonistic paradise with a beautiful man, Kalipso. Naturally, when he breaks away to rejoin wife Penelope, the critic feels slighted as no self-respecting, authentic gay man would do that even if the woman happens to be the beguiling, long-suffering Penelope. Despite the denigrating criticism, his well-written novel lands Less invitations to various literary events in Europe, all of which he accepts on account of former paramour Freddy's marriage; Less needs a valid excuse as to why he can't attend one day's nuptials, so he makes sure he is out of the country for a least a month. But it does make sense since the groom, Freddy, the son of Less's nemesis Carlos, remains his biggest love, an insurmountable emotional obstacle since it is left unrequited. Towards the end, just to elongate the book, Greer has Less venture into Morocco to visit an old friend and India to give him ideas for a new tome. At the end, he winds up in Japan to critique the food. How desultory is that? 

Worthy of mention as well, but not surprising, is that there are no leading ladies in this tall tale. There are a few interesting, yet fleeting females that seem to appear and vanish like mirages in the Sahara, but not one is memorable unlike some mirages that are :). 

Unfortunately, there is no real eating (but there's the drinking of champagne and there's what he does or attempts to do in Japan) or praying (Less is not religious, yet he winds up on the grounds of a Christian retreat in India) in the 259-page book. Which means there are no actual concrete motifs (unless you count the champagne) to unite the random except for the anticipated, unconnected, outlandish conceits that kept me picking up the book instead of putting it down and leaving it closed indefinitely. The novel is glorious in its wordplay. It does not surprise me that Greer won the coveted Pulitzer as he is the only young author whose work I've read lately whose creative writing comes close to inspired or inspiring, so there is that. 

However, as a conservative, pedantic, Old School writer, I am pretty closed minded when it comes to rules. A half century ago, I was taught to keep the point of view of the narration consistent. Greer doesn't, and it confuses the reader as most shifts that come out of nowhere do. Going from third to first in the last few pages may suffice as the "unpredictable" touch that one learns to add into a short story in one's first fiction class, but it is just unnecessarily jarring to the reader. (Actually, I guessed the identity of the narrator from the very beginning, so I wasn't surprised at all.)

Unless I get my small group of close gay friends together in a book club, which is highly unlikely because most of them are touring actors, I think I'll pass on any "Less" sequels by Greer. But that doesn't mean that you should. This is a subjective opinion piece, after all. Read it for the uniqueness of voice and wish secretly that you could come up with comparisons as inventive as Greer's. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #truth, #BookReview, #LiteraryCriticism