Book review Danzy Senna Colored Television

 

 

 

 

Danzy Senna, Colored Television

The title is a clever play on words as the book is about the fate of Mulatto’s in the world of commercial Television i.e. they are neither black or white, brown or white, or oriental or white. They cannot pitch their tents comfortably in either polarity.  The ambiguities of race, sex, education, and social class are all put into a blender and out comes this novel that takes aim at  the futility of serious art and education when pitted against the nasty business of popular TV.  

There are some nice observational nuggets along the way. e.g. “One of the strange parts of being a teacher was how it made time stand still. If you didn’t look in a mirror, you could trick yourself into thinking that time wasn’t passing because your students kept staying young year after year.”  

The main character is Jane, an untenured adjunct English and writing professor at a Los Angeles college. She has published one semi-successful novel and is now married to an African American abstract painter who has not sold a single canvas. Jane is bi-racial and they have two small children who are also mulattos. The family is swamped with credit card debt and barely eking out an existence while she tries to finish a second novel that she hopes will make her a literary name and gain her tenure.  A further complication puts the value of the artistic life to a somber test. Jane’s sees her good friend Bret, a black man who has made millions writing popular TV programs about zombies, as someone who gave up his “promise of glory and immortality to spout drivel in that “land where original ideas come to die.” She was and still wonders whether she married the wrong man.   

Bret goes on a year-long trip to Australia to develop a new show and allows Jane and her husband Lenny to live rent free in his fancy hillside Los Angeles home in his absence.  Lenny can paint and Jane can work on her magnum opus—the major novel that her husband has dubbed her “Muletto War and Peace.  She finally finishes the novel, but her agent says it is unpublishable and the free house comes to an end when Bret, the owner, comes back early.

With two difficult children and a husband who has never sold a painting, Jane finally jumps at what looks like a chance to break into commercial television. She finds another successful black producer and pitches a TV series that will humorously explore the difficult world of Mulatto life.  Will it save the family bacon?  You will have to read it to see.

The book has sardonic humor, a bitter-sweet conclusion, and characters who keep you turning the pages. Most mortals suffer from fame deficiency. Anyone who has dreamed of making it big in art without selling out to popular culture will find something to hang on to here.  It’s not War and Peace, but it is worth a shot.    

I give it a 4 out of 5 

Theatre Review of The Wolves by Sarah Delappe

 

Saw Sarah Delappe’s play titled The Wolves last Sunday afternoon in the small studio at Theatre Cedar Rapids. It premiered Off Broadway in 2016 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in that year. It has been a popular choice at educational theatres for some time because of its cast of ten women and its treatment of the growing pains of young adolescent girls.

Set in the pre-game warm-ups for a female high school soccer season, the piece focuses on the girl’s comments interspersed with their pre-game warm-up exercises. We hear about their sexual problems, menstruation, the integration of new girls onto the team, and ultimately, an injury and tragedy.

Unfortunately, the production falls considerably short of the serious themes presented. The chosen production style was a tunnel with the audience divided into two facing sets of seats. I suspect this was to mirror the competitive stadium sides during matches. The director put his cast into exercise circles a great deal and that managed to give as much face time to the unpeopled sides as to the peopled sides. This meant that every patron saw ¾ of the show in either profile or full back. In our seating position to the right of center in a corner where there was no entrance at all, we had even less full-face contact with the actors.  

This might have worked out if the actors had sufficient vocal strength to be heard and understood even when turned away. I know that these days young actors expect to be miked, but sufficient volume should not be a problem in a theatre that seats barely a hundred people.  More lines were mumbled and spoken to the floor than not. The constant movement and ungainly twisted exercise positions also did not help with breath support. This show desperately needed a vocal coach.

Had I not seen a previous production of the piece, I’m not sure I would have been able to follow the narrative. In one scene the goalie spent scads of energy throwing a ball against the back wall and running laps until exhausted. The folks next to me, who apparently did not hear much of the dialogue that came before, were totally mystified as to what was going on. The death of one of the team’s members in a car crash had been missed. Finally, the big ending featuring the arrival of the mother of the dead girl bringing a bag of oranges, was squashed by lights going down too soon for us to register its importance. She had brought oranges before to help spur the team on earlier. A better and more emotionally riveting lighting choice at the end would have brought the lights down slowly until only a pin spot on the bag of fruit for the team was lit. Then a fast blackout. 

I cannot recommend this production.

The Serpent Under by Bonnie Macbird

 

The Serpent Under by Bonnie Macbird

The Serpent Under is another of the multitude of titles offered as knockoffs of the exploits of the world’s most famous detective—Sherlock Holmes. They have been appearing regularly ever since the original Arthur Conan Doyle copyrights expired.

In this adventure of Holmes and Watson, Bonnie Macbird, a transplant from California who now lives in London, takes on murder, snakes, and gypsies. A wealthy young royal retainer named Jane Wandley has been found strangled in Windsor Palace. Her face has been garishly tattooed with a snake swallowing his own tail. Holmes is summoned to the palace to investigate. The back story takes us into a fatal fire on the woman’s father’s estate that killed a Gypsy woman and her child. There are suspects and additional bodies aplenty as the story unfolds.   Holmes and Watson do their best to identify the killer in the face of an impatient Queen, bombs, suffragettes, and a deadly King Cobra.

Macbird sticks to the Victorian period for her setting and does a good job of parodying the Holmesian style of questioning to deduce and then confront the miscreant. She knows her London streets and weather and evokes the Victorian atmosphere with competence.

This is a pleasant read if you have run out of the original stories and novels.

I give it a 4 out of 5    

Death Comes in Threes book review

 

Michael Jecks, Death Comes In Threes

I enjoy historical mysteries. They are a fun way to read a popular genre while getting a refresher on the ambiance of whatever period they are set in. to that end, I picked up a copy of Michael Jecks’ Death Comes in Threes on the recent acquisition rack at our local library and found out rapidly that I had come upon a loser. It was touted as one of a series of Bloody Mary Tudor mysteries and was set in England in the late 1550’s. Mary is on the throne and Elizabeth I is waiting in the wings. 

The main character is Jack Blackjack, a resourceful low-life who lives easily in the lowest brothels as he does in gentleman’s residences. He is supposedly a secret assassin for the young Elizabeth but while defending himself from two murder charges he also manages to get himself seen as a supporter of Bloody Mary.

The narrative is first person and plods along through a revolving sequence of characters. Mostly we hear the story from Blackjack himself, but we also get chapters narrated by a bawdy housewife and his ostensible employer. The joking self-deprecating style gets tiresome quickly and the plot seems full of ridiculous coincidences and pasteboard minor characters. Even though the 16^th century London place details are accurate, they don’t make up for the less-than-convincing plot.  

About halfway through I started skipping whole passages without feeling deprived of anything. I should not have finished it, but I did.

I give it a 1 out of 5. 

 

Andrew McCall Smith A TIME OF LOVE AND TARTAN

 

A book in the 44 Scotland Street series from 2018

This guy pops out books like an AK 47.   We are back with Domenica and Angus and all our friends like Pat and Bruce, Matthew and his triplets, Big Lou, and of course Bertie and his parents--Bruce and Irene. Irene is the marvelous mother who decides that men are overrated and decides to go off to get a PhD with her apparent lover while Bertie's dad quits his job as a government statistician. The book was so  appealing that I reread it in its entirety before I discovered that I had read it in 2018 when it first came out.

It is filled with local color, rib tickling humor, sly cultural observations about art, history, philosophy, literature, music, and poetry. You name it.  McCall Smith seems to have been to every nook and cranny in Scotland and read every book published since the beginning of printing. And he remembers them well enough to bring them to bear on his delightful characters and their foibles and troubles. Among other things, he takes on the loss of civility, women’s rights, bureaucracy, and the general lack of kindness to others. I liked it seven years ago and it still passes muster. A joy to read and a joy to re-read. There is a bon mot on every page e.g. “The truth then dawned . . . . that everything was finite and that what was taken for granted had actually been paid for by years of work for somebody whom one would never know, and who might never have been able to enjoy any of it anyway.”

 

Thorns, Lust, and Glory by Estelle Paranque

 

With a sub-title of “The Betrayal of Anne Boleyn, this book goes over the well-known conflict between the English King Henry VIII and the Pope. I knew the basics from my previous knowledge of English history and my familiarity with some of the fictional treatments of the struggle in The Royal Gambit and The Lion in Winter.  Paranque’s book concentrates on Anne’s French connections and the secondary struggle of Henry with his French counterpart Francis 1^st.

Lots of names of minor courtiers are mixed in with the well-known personages like Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. I guess it told me more than I needed or wanted to know about the circumstances leading to Anne’s beheading in a courtyard at the Tower of London on May 19,1536.  

I give it 2 out of 5

A review of Wolf Pack by C J Box

 

C.J. Box is a Wyoming native and he has been hunting and fishing his entire life. He has written eighteen mystery thrillers that feature Joe Pickett, -a Wyoming game warden.  

In this book, Pickett is faced with an assassination group called the Wolf Pack that carries out hits for a drug cartel and a mysterious local with no discoverable past, who is flying a drone that has stampeded local animals. The case becomes personal when he discovers that his teenage daughter is dating the man’s teenage son. The FBI enters the picture and tries to keep Pickett from investigating the man further while the connections between the so-called Wolf Pack assassinations and the mystery man start to become apparent. The action tends to go back and forth between the pastoral countryside and the brutal killings by the Wolf Pack.

The book is nicely paced, but once you get used to his method of alteration of violence with calm, it does become pretty predictable. I figured out that the man with no background was in the Witness Protection program before our detective got to it. From there on it was clear that the four killers would have to meet Pickett and friends in a bloody conclusion. 

I enjoyed the background nature descriptions a lot because on a trip to the west years ago, we drove through the Big Horn mountains and were inspired by their rugged beauty.  If all of Box’s books are like this one they will be competently written and appealing perhaps primarily to male readers who are drawn to old style cowboy westerns in the more modern west.

On the other hand, If you don’t have a hankering for senseless killing and graphic violence, you might want to stay in the “Cozy Mystery” section of your local Barnes and Noble. The book is organized chronologically and each section begins with a literary quote about wolves. I liked the final one the best since it was from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, a universal wolf,.

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up himself.