SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS + DUTCH TREAT . . .

It’s not often that I get down off a horse—or a book—in midstream . . . but I did just that a few weeks ago with the Scottish novel The Crow Road by Iain Banks. Originally published in 1992, the novel recently appeared in an American edition: its back cover blurbs promise a book that is “riveting” and “masterful”—all the usual blarney. But 206 pages into the 501-page tome, I finally said to myself that “enough is enough”: neither the narrative nor the characters ever came to life for me . . . so I just set it down and moved on.

There’s a chance that at some point I’ll pick up where I left off in The Crow Road, but I think that the novel’s problem—or my problem with the novel—is encapsulated in this observation by John Gardner in the chapter titled “Interest and Truth” in his book The Art of Fiction:

Thus it appears that to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it-the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot . . .

After setting aside Banks’s novel, I learned from a friend that it was adapted as a popular BBC television series in the mid-1990s. Perhaps the narrative lent itself to such an episodic format right from the start: maybe that’s why the novel’s “narrative arc” seemed to me so intolerably slow in developing. Hmmm . . .

But in the meantime, I picked up another novel which that quotation from Gardner coincidentally affirms: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. With its protagonist quickly identified as a Dutch-born British banker relocated to New York City, where he gets involved with a group of cricket-playing Trinidadians, I was not so sure setting out where I would find my angle of entry into that multiply “foreign” world. I think the point where I got hooked was on p. 31, when protagonist Hans van den Broek describes his separation from his wife who, suffering from post-9/11 trauma, returns with their son to her parents’ home in England:

The three of us flew together to England. We stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton at their house in Barnes, in southwest London, arriving on Christmas Eve. We opened gifts on Christmas morning, ate turkey with stuffing and potatoes and Brussels sprouts, drank sherry and red wine and port, made small talk, went to bed, slept, awoke, and then spent an almost unendurable further three days chewing, swallowing, sipping, walking, and exchanging reasonable remarks. Then a black cab pulled up in front of the house. Rachel offered to accompany me to the airport. I shook my head. I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until he began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.

That was where the world that Joseph O’Neill created—“his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others”—began to emerge for me as “a single, coherent gesture.” Netherland proved altogether worthy of the blarney of its back cover blurbs.

NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO . . .

“God is in the details,” legendary skyscraper architect Mies van der Rohe reminds us. . . . So this morning I got up and put on my favorite pair of Levi’s® and my favorite t-shirt advertising Gibson® guitars. With rain in the forecast, I chose my Teva® sandals over my Birkenstocks.® My new Ray Ban® polarized sunglasses at the ready in case the weather forecast was wrong, I headed out the door, revved up my beloved Volvo S60,® fired up my Garmin nuvi 260W GPS Navigator® . . . and then just sat there.

Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Was that the emptiness that I suddenly felt as I paused so fully “detailed” in my suburban driveway?

Or was it that I had forgotten to plug my 120gb iPod classic® into the Kensington Digital FM Transmitter®? Seeking a cure for what ailed me, I thumbed my way through several hundred tunes until I landed on “No Particular Place to Go,” that old Chuck Berry number that laments the “trouble” caused by a different sort of “device”:

No particular place to go,
So we parked way out on the Kokomo.
The night was young and the moon was bold,
So we both decided to take a stroll.
Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!

Perhaps the YouTube video of Berry performing this tune live reminds us of the flipside to van der Rohe's belief: “Man proposes, God disposes . . .”

DIANA KRALL, LIVE IN . . . NEW HAMPSHIRE

A couple of days ago, I happened to visit the website of legendary jazz photographer Herman Leonard. Two mouse-clicks into that site, the featured photograph is a priceless image shot from the rear of the bandstand in a New York City jazz club in 1949, capturing Ella Fitzgerald singing to an utterly enraptured Duke Ellington at the foremost table and an obviously impressed Benny Goodman at the table behind him—to my eye a classic instance of what another legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, deemed “the decisive moment.” Ah, those were the days, I thought, when jazz was performed in the intimate confines of a casual nightclub—not as it mostly is today, with audiences being herded in and out of cramped hotel lounges like Scullers or The Regattabar . . . or else with audiences congregating in massive numbers at a venue like the Meadowbrook Pavilion in Gilford, NH. So I was thinking about that photograph yesterday as the missus and I motored north of the border to see jazz chanteuse and pianist Diana Krall perform at the Meadowbrook Pavilion.

But as we were driving, we were iListening to Live in Paris, Krall’s remarkable recording from 2002, so I was hopeful that the show would at least approach that standard of excellence. (I should mention that back in the Fall of 1984, we had the fabulous fortune of seeing Ella Fitzgerald perform live in Mechanics Hall in Worcester—an evening made even more special with the unannounced appearance for the second set of guitarist Joe Pass, with whom Ella had collaborated on a couple of classic duet albums: it would be unfair to use that transcendent concert as a measure for every musical event we’ve attended since then . . .) Well . . .

Well, first of all the venue: the Meadowbrook Pavilion is a wonderful concert site! It’s easy to get to and from (about 2 hours from Boston); the parking was free; the site itself is spacious and clean with decent food options; there’s a “second stage” that features a live performance before the main event . . . And then there’s the pavilion itself—a large open-sided roofed structure that accommodates several thousand people: it has tiered seating, a full-size stage, a good sound system, and large screens at each side of the stage projecting the show from shifting camera angles—no reasonable complaints!

As for the concert . . . well, Diana Krall delivered! She played for a full hour-and-a-half and pretty much offered a thrill a minute. I recall that when she first emerged on the musical scene (about 15 years ago), critics debated whether she was a bona fide jazz artist. I think that debate has quieted down: Krall may not be the world’s “greatest” (whatever that means) jazz singer and she may not be the world’s “greatest” jazz pianist . . . but she may well be the “greatest” combination of those two musical identities, as she chooses both songs and arrangements that allow her to showcase her estimable strengths as a musician . . . which include truly “owning” a tune, both vocally and at the keyboard. She also knows how to own an audience. This was evident from the opening tunes, “I Love Being Here With You” and “Let’s Fall in Love” . . . which happen to be the opening tunes on Live in Paris. An auspicious start! The rest of the evening’s songlist comprised mostly jazz standards from her various albums, including a couple from her recent bossa-centered album Quiet Nights. Surrounding herself with a wonderfully supportive trio—Robert Hurst on bass, Jeff Hamilton on drums, and the dazzling Anthony Wilson on guitar—Krall shone in the footlights, but she also shared the limelight generously, making for a fully satisfying evening. We’ve been following Diana Krall’s career pretty much from the start, but this was the first time we’ve managed to catch her “live and in person”: no doubt we’ll try to catch her again, whatever the size of the venue may be.

AT THE MOVIES WITH CORMAC McCARTHY . . .

Two of the highlights of my summer reading last year were novels by Cormac McCarthy—No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. I found the former so “dark” and “grim” and yet so “gripping” that I had to admit: “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for the movie. . . .” I think that at the time I didn’t even know there was a movie of All the Pretty Horses.

Well, finally I got up the nerve to watch No Country for Old Men this past weekend . . . just a couple of hours after I whetted my appetite by watching All the Pretty Horses. The former was just as I expected it would be—“dark,” “grim,” “gripping” . . . and also just wonderfully made: no surprise to me that it won four Oscars—for best supporting actor (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh), best director (Joel and Ethan Coen), best adapted screenplay, and overall best picture. I found it remarkably faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the novel: it was thus both riveting and disturbing, as the violence is graphic and relentless in McCarthy’s vision of what amounts to a moral apocalypse. Neither the movie nor the book is for the faint-of-heart—but I have now survived both!

As for All the Pretty Horses: well, the movie channel that I watched it on gave it only 2 stars (out of a possible 4). To my mind, that’s a serious underrating. In fact, no less than No Country for Old Men, the film is wonderfully true to the novel that I admired so much when I read it last summer. And perhaps that is why I would give the film a 4-star rating: a viewer unfamiliar with the novel might find the adaptation a bit meandering—“leisurely,” the blurb on the TV listings described it—but for a horse-centered quest narrative, that is the nature of the beast (as it were). And, believe me, I don’t give that rating lightly, as I had to overcome my general coolness toward actor Matt Damon, who plays the lead role of John Grady Cole. From where I sat, he was perfectly cast, as was Penélope Cruz as Alejandra, his love interest and (near) femme fatale. This film was a fine first half of a great Sunday double bill of Cormac McCarthy at the movies . . .