The Top Five* Fictional Characters I’d Like to Slap Around:

1.  Lily Bart, The House of Mirth. First, last, and always.  How can she not see the mistakes she’s making?  I just want to shake her awake, tell her to snap out of it.

2.  Laurence Selden, The House of Mirth. ‘I love her; I don’t love her.  I wish I could save her, but what could I do?’ Confirmed bachelor, my Aunt Fannie.  Come out of the closet already, Larry.

3.  Carrie Bell, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. The character that spawned this version of the list.  Annoying both in her selfishness and in her inability to stand up for the things she wants, or even to believe that the things she wants might be important.  Weak enough to be pushed around by everyone.  And crappy taste in men, to boot.

4.  Newland Archer, The Age of Innocence.** ‘I love her, but gosh, society frowns upon our love.’ Worse yet:  ‘Society once frowned upon our love, but even though no one would mind our relationship now, it would just hurt too much to see her again.’ Please.

5.  Isabel Archer, Portrait of a Lady. Okay, the courage of your convictions is one thing.  Standing by your commitments, sure.  But not getting yourself out of an abusive relationship just because you said I do and a lady keeps her word is just moronic.

*I am both dissatisfied with the five-ness of this list, when I began with the intent of creating a list of ten, and with the list itself.  Contributions, please.  How should I fill out the list, and who on the list needs replacing?

**NB:  Archer should perhaps be higher in the rankings because of the multiplication of my desire to inflict violence upon him by Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of said character in the Scorsese film.

like this.

1.  For his conviction that he had the right temperament to succeed in his adaptation of Possession, a brilliant novel now stinking up a Multiplex near you:  “I loved the parallel stories … really all the things that were in the book interested me. I was in academia. I’ve been an anglophile for a long time. I have always written about relationships and here were two relationships that were very different. So all the elements spoke to me, it just seemed like a natural fit.” (From the IndieWire interview.)

2.  In the Company of Men.

3.  Your Friends and Neighbors.  (Need I elaborate?)

4.  For saying the following about Your Friends and Neighbors:  “I think of the movie as a comedy in many ways. I think there are quite a few laughs in the movie. As you’re sitting there watching it, you may think about something beyond that, and feel that it’s got some teeth to it, but I do think it has some bite. But it’s still a comedy.” (From the Onion A/V Club interview.)

5.  For making it impossible for me ever to like Ben Stiller again.

6.  For joking, with regard to In the Company of Men, that “I was trying to make a feel-good summer hit (laughs).” (From the first Salon interview.)

7.  For single-handedly creating the career of Aaron Eckhart.

8.  For my sneaking sense that he would enjoy the fact that I hate these movies so much.

9.  For being a real bonehead about the reaction to his movies:  “At [In the Company of Men‘s] Sundance debut, an audience already on edge over the uncomfortable ending threw its first question at the writer/director: Why is the movie’s victim a deaf woman? ‘And I just, kinda offhanded, said, “Because I always thought deaf people were funny,”’ recalls LaBute, who, of course, instantly acquired a rep for insensitivity. ‘For a long time, that label stuck—the film’s still called misogynist.’” (From the Dallas Observer.)

10.  For having an insufficient number of rotten tomatoes hurled at him.

11.  For this assessment of the horrors of 9/11:  “I wrote about a sort of flash point I had, where I was standing in line, four days later, in Union Station in Chicago, lugging my bags around trying to get on this train and half-hoping there was a first-class line that I could get in to, and sort of realizing, you know, that we’re back to basics, everybody was just sort of fighting for space. And I had this moment of thinking, ugh, I really don’t like this, it’s really inconvenient what happened. It’s really sad, of course. But it’s rather inconvenient today. “ (From the second Salon interview.)

12.  For the thought, the very thought, that he might be involved in the film version of Angels in America.

No, not my own.

As promised, some thoughts about Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, from the cover of which one would be hard-pressed to tell that the novel is set in late twentieth-century London.

The novel revolves around Ludo, a prodigious genius cultivated by his brilliant, eccentric single mother, Sybilla.  Ludo’s insatiable appetite for knowledge leads him to acquire every new language and new subject that he comes across.  He learns to read at 2.  He reads the Odyssey at 4—oh, yes, in Greek.  He absorbs information on Lagrangian mechanics, number theory, and aerodynamics with seemingly little effort.  But the one piece of information he most wants—the identity of his father—is the one that eludes him.

Most commentators on the novel have concentrated upon Ludo’s quest for a suitable father figure, and indeed, the novel seems to foster such a focus, as Sybilla, whose voice begins the novel, gradually recedes into the text’s background (frustratingly, for one reviewer, who dismisses the novel as evidence of a first-timer’s over-ambition).  Ludo’s search draws upon the film referenced by the novel’s title, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, as he constructs a series of tests for each of the potential father-figures he approaches.  As both film and novel remind us, however, “a good samurai will parry the blow,” and thus a worthy figure for Ludo’s attentions will foil his schemes.

The title’s focus on the last samurai, however, suggests that the quest is not as simple as “a young boy’s search for a father” might make it seem.  While each of the men Ludo tests (not counting his actual, biological father, who is of mediocre intellect and even lesser talent) can offer him the kind of intellectual support that can be extended from one genius to another, each has also been irretrievably damaged by his own genius, becoming filled with anger, or ambition, or despair, or madness.  In Ludo’s encounter with the last potential samurai, the purpose of this quest for a father resolves into something unexpected:  not a search for a male role-model who can lead him into new fields of knowledge and adventure, but rather a search for someone who has faced the perils of genius and found a way to survive.  Someone who can give not Ludo but Sibylla the wherewithal to go on.

The novel seems to me, then, in its final chapters, not to relegate Sibylla to the fading background, but rather to investigate precisely, if in a way that can never be wholly satisfied, the nature of her fading, and what can be done to save her.  One of the perils of genius, in a world of marketing copy and quickie reviews, is its very evanescence, its etherealness, its tendency to evade the grasping hand like smoke.  Like any good samurai, however, the last one can parry the blow.

I’ve been running hither and yon (mostly yon) these last weeks, and dealing with the complexities of life-in-a-suitcase, and thus failing to resume anything like my normal programming schedule.  But I promise, I’ll be back with new things soon.

Like:  thoughts about Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (which bears no connection to the forthcoming Cruise vehicle), which was pressed upon me by a colleague and which I’ve spent my few available writing hours instead devouring.

And:  twelve reasons why I hate Neil LaBute, none of which so aptly or calmly put as Bill’s.

And:  an ode to my new Titanium.

And:  a notable absence of whining about the intricacies of my move, which is at last due to complete this Saturday.

All this, and more, in the next few days.

Having gotten myself and my stuff by various paths back to Southern California (though I am at a loss to say we all arrived in one piece, as said stuff has yet to be unpacked, and cannot be unpacked until a date by which the promise of moving-company reimbursement will no doubt have passed), and having dealt with the year’s worth of nonsense mail that piled up in the office, and having passed on the manuscript of my Stupid Book to a couple of friendly readers, and having done what organizational tasks can actually be accomplished at this point –

– having done all that, I recognized this weekend that I exist in the blissful and much too rare state of having Nothing in Particular to Do.  And thus, I spent the weekend lying around reading summer novels and watching summer DVD releases.

I read one book that has topped the bestseller lists for some weeks, which I found moving and fluid, and wildly inappropriate as a birthday gift for the aunt to whom I’d sent it last month.

I read another, recommended to me by the highest of authorities (authorities whom, it may interest you to know, have now moved on to the book above) but, while the book was a fast-paced, congenial read, it has nonetheless caused a significant revision in my list of the top-ten fictional characters I’d most like to slap around.

I also watched two movies recently released on DVD, one of which I found thoroughly charming, if perhaps not quite worthy of an entire companion DVD of “special features,” and the other of which left me with a bad taste in my mouth, the acrid after-effects of a very very High Concept that simply doesn’t pay off (despite a brilliant performance by a former Dancer, of the Dirty variety).

The end result of all of which is more reading, catching up on some things I meant to read two years ago, and anxiously anticipating the release of some other things yet to come.

Hi.  You guys are moving me, and I’m trying to get some information about where my stuff is.

– Okay.

– Today’s the last day of my delivery window.  And I got a call yesterday telling me that the driver would be showing up with my stuff this morning, between 9 and 12.

– Okay.

– It’s now 2:00.

– Okay. [Faintly disguised annoyance, accompanied by much clicking in the background.] Your delivery is complete.

– What?

– It says here that your delivery has been made.

– That’s not possible.  I’m standing here in my apartment, where I’ve been since 8 this morning, and my stuff is not here.  There has been no delivery.

– Yes, there has.  Your stuff was delivered to [name deleted] Van and Storage.

– No.  It wasn’t supposed to go there.  It was supposed to come here.

– Well, you need to take that up with the broker.  They sent it to [name deleted] Van and Storage.

– No.  I told them and I told you the address here.

– Yes, well, it was delivered to [name deleted] Van and Storage, at [address deleted].

– But that’s my address.

– What?

– That is the address of my apartment, where I am currently standing, and where my stuff is not.

– [Annoyed and befuddled silence.] Let me call you back.

– Okay.

[A long period of waiting, accompanied by heart palpitations and the serious urge to drink heavily.]

– Hello?

– Hi. It’s [name deleted]. Your driver is on the way.  He’s just stuck in traffic.

– So my stuff hasn’t been delivered after all.

– No.  There was a change of driver, so they marked the stuff as delivered for some reason.

– A change of driver?

– Well, yes. [Embarrassed pause.] The first driver sort of quit.

– Quit?

– Yeah.  And they had to send another driver out to recover the truck in Vegas.  But he’ll be there soon.  I promise.