An imaginative treatment of love, death, struggle and loss of Shakespeare's eleven year old son Hamnet with a biopic view of the effect on the lives of his family, in particular his wife Agnes, and his most famous play.
3 out of 5*
by Joe Igoe
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
O’Neill (the Nobel Prize winner Eugene, not Joseph of Netherland, just to avoid confusion) wrote this three-hour family shouting match between 1939 and 1941 with instructions that it not be published until 25 years after his death. His wife ignored his wishes and it premiered less than three years after O’Neill shuffled off to Tir Tairngire. It went on to win the Tony for Best Play of 1956 and a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Moreover, per Wikipedia, “The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.”
Heady company, especially when you consider the scathing reviews of a healthy JFDI majority, which found it unrelentingly depressing, repetitive and “yet another story about angry Irish drunks.” And it is certainly all three of those. But it is also a showcase for wide acting range, as characters regularly go from incandescent anger to maudlin self-pity to gentle understanding, often in just three lines of speech.
I first saw this play on ABC television in 1975 with an all-British cast that included Lawrence Olivier, Constance Cummings and a very young Ronald Pickup. My reaction then was that the acting was superb, and I was shocked that the mother—anyone’s mother—could be a “dope fiend” before the 1950s. This time around, I watched the version with Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher, mainly because a friend had seen it on Broadway back in 1987 and I wanted to discuss it with him. It is meant as a vehicle for Lemmon, but he is woefully miscast, while Peter Gallagher surprises with some real acting chops.
Which just goes to show that, with few exceptions (see “The Ferryman”) plays should be seen and not read. In particular, they should be seen live, because it is only in the theatre that you can feel the emotional effort that is essential to evoking empathy, especially for the seriously flawed characters in this exhausting work.
****
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
I chose this book after a confluence of random events. A very good friend died too young at age 52 of a brain tumour. His wife was clearing out their possessions, which included her book collection, which included such well-known titles as “The Time Traveller’s Wife,” “The Book Seller of Kabul” and “Trout Fishing in the Yemen.” This novel seemed to be an outlier, and so it was.
The first chapter introduced a first-person narrator/protagonist who is an international banker who plays cricket in New York City and has just learned that the body of an ex-pat Trinidadian friend, with the hybrid name of Chuck Ramkissoon, has been found decomposing in a NYC canal. It was at that point that I stopped reading, thinking this would be the perfect choice for a JFDI selection. International banker. Expat. Cricket. Murder mystery. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. And it was a Richard and Judy Book Selection, meaning it must be a page-turner. Turns out, it is a meticulously written, thematically complicated tale about what James Pollock incisively described as “displacement and replacement.”
The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is the product of a safe Dutch life (“The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries”) now working in the city formerly known as New Amsterdam. He has expertise in a niche area of global investment and an aptitude for that mostly un-Dutch and decidedly un-American sport of cricket. He also has a wife Rachel and a young son Jake.
Major plots and sublots are as follows:
Hans first meets Chuck in a cricket match in which Hans is a player and Chuck an umpire. Hans marvels at Chuck’s ability to defuse a disagreement that absurdly threatens to become deadly.
The comfortable quarters in which Hans and Family reside are gutted by fire, and the three move into the metaphor-laden Chelsea Hotel (“The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the void at its centre had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building”).
Hans decides he needs driving lessons, which Chuck is only too ready to provide.
Family relations splinter over life in America, as Rachel declaims, “It’s a question of not raising Jake in an ideologically diseased country whose leaders suffer from delusions that exempt it from the rules of the civilized behaviour it seeks to enforce on others.” Rachel returns with Jake to England.
Hans tries to maintain family ties with bi-weekly (or so) trips to the UK. Job performance suffers.
Hans has an awkward one-night stand, while Rachel embarks on an affair that fizzles in six months.
Hans continues with driving lessons from Chuck, eventually realising he (Hans) is providing cover for a numbers game and its brutal payment enforcement, which Chuck describes as normal business and business practice in his former homeland.
Displacement and replacement, indeed. The expat delusion that you can have it both ways. But to that, I would add “reconciliation,” at least in the case of this book. For in the end Hans, Rachel and Jake remain a family. As Hans writes. “Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were married.”
****½
Eugene O'Neill
Grim trajectory of an Irish-American family of failed actors (father and son) , addiction (mother), consumption (the other son, and not the retail kind). The antithesis of the American dream.
Substitute oxycontin for morphine, Aids/COVID for TB, and some other addiction for Irish whiskey, and you see things haven't changed much since the 1920s.
Time marches on. And we, the foot soldiers of JFDI, brothers-in-charms, have stuck with it.
Through 75 books. Ten years. Countless meals, drinks, laughs, lively discussions, and field trips, to arrive where?
Why here, of course.
BY TOM WELLS
In the opening line of Red Plenty, Francis Spufford notes that the book is neither a novel nor a history but a fairytale, specifically a Russian fairytale. I admit that my limited knowledge of fairy tales runs to those Disney has made into cartoons, but they seem to be of two types: (1) they lived happily ever after; and (2) don’t go into the woods. I don’t remember the one about the insular community that vainly thought it could create a world-beating economy through rigid state planning and enforced control of travel, creativity and critical thinking.
Genre definition aside, Francis Spufford has succeeded in creating an exhaustively researched, superbly written historical fiction about the failed effort to escape the shackles of Tsarist enslavement and Stalinist paranoia to give its citizenry a standard of living that would make it the envy of Muncie and Peoria. Where he has not succeeded is in creating what a fairytale must surely have: archetypal characters you root for, fear for or fear.
As a result, this is a novel more admirable than digestible. Open to just about any page, and you will find at least one fragment, sentence or paragraph that makes you wish you could write like that. Take page 190 (which I just randomly flipped to), for instance:
“The supply system had moronically misclassified (the place)…as a college town, in need of the calorific intake required to lift pencils and wipe blackboards; but there were forty thousand people living and working in the industrial zone out by the tracks now, and between the students and the loco workers, a locust would have been hard put to find a spare crumb.”
Or the description of one anxious toady on facing page 191 as “sweating with desperate amiability.”
Verbal highlights aside, what most undermines the author’s genre claim is that the reader knows there is no fairytale ending to the Soviet experiment. No happily-ever-after or even axe-man-eviscerating-wolf. Just a slow creep toward another form of suppressive plutocracy.
***½
RED PLENTY
Francis Spufford
The USSR in the 1950s- when communism was still an alternative
BY TOM WELLS
When We Cease to Understand the World is a 2020 collection of five increasingly fictionalized short stories that became all the rage when Barack Obama included it in his Summer 2021 reading list. If there is a unifying theme it appears to be that the single-minded pursuit of scientific truth leads to individual madness and global destruction. Happy days.
The first story—which Labatut notes is barely fictionalized—chronicles the yin and yang of scientific discovery. As one example, Labatut describes the discovery by Fritz Haber of the synthesis of ammonia from the nitrogen that makes up 78% of our air. This scientific leap led to the mass production of fertilizer that enabled crop output previously restrained by manure and guano availability. A few years later, Haber made a discovery of quite a different stripe when he invented the mustard gas that killed or crippled hundreds of thousands of World War I combatants. Meanwhile, over the course of the last 125 years, it has transpired that ready access to nitrogen may have provided a bulwark against famine but it has also—as the Night Gardener in the book’s final instalment points out--driven the Earth’s population to an unsustainable eight billion persons. Yin and yang, indeed.
By the fourth installment of the collection, the stories have become more fictionalized, the writing more fanciful and the destruction more palpable, as it dramatizes the intellectual battle between the quantum disciple Werner Heisenberg (he of the Uncertainty Principal) and the more classical Erwin Schrödinger (he of the Cat) with a mixture of argument, hallucination and icky suppuration. Heisenberg’s hypothesis about the immeasurable dual states of electrons—they can be both particle and wave--may have led to the modern computer age but it also, as Heisenberg himself sees in a frenzied vision, fostered the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Countless men and women with slanted eyes, their bodies sculpted of soot and ash, were stretching out their arms to try and touch him. They thronged around him…, humming like a cluster of bees caught in an invisible web.”
Which, in the minds of Labatut and those who have praised this book, is a far more horrific reality than the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Osaka and countless other strategic Japanese cities that would have otherwise occurred.
Without the scientific leaps of the 20th century, the world would have certainly seen less mass death from chemical poison and nuclear fusion. Instead, it would have seen time-honored population control from those two stalwarts, famine and disease. I, for one, would have been dead from pleural pneumonia before I turned twenty-one. I may not understand the world, but I do understand where I’d be without 20th C. scientific advancement.
**½
