D. IT IS WRITTEN . . .

As I pretty much confessed in a post-Oscar post in February, I am not the world’s biggest movie buff, and although I attend an Oscar party with diehard moviegoers pretty much every year, I generally ante up for my daughters and let them fill in ballots in the winner-take-all voting pool. But last night I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I wish now that I had been filling in a ballot myself in this past Oscar season. I thought the film was terrific from start to finish and would have slotted it in as winner not only in the “obvious” categories—Best Picture and Best Director—but also (why not pretty much run the table?) Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography and Writing (Adapted Screenplay): all the categories in which it got the Oscar nod. Hey, I could have picked up some decent walking-around money!

But part of what intrigued me immediately about the movie was not its overall engaging effect on so many levels (all of the above categories—and more) but its improbable ending, which brings together Jamil and Latika in a moment promising a happily-ever-after future. The movie itself concedes the improbability—even the implausibility—of this ending by showing during the closing credits an unlikely ensemble dance sequence, featuring Dev Patel (Jamil) and Freida Pinto (Latika), delightfully choreographed to the popular Hindi song “Jai Ho.” Part of the effect is to remind us of and/or to test the strength of our viewerly “willing suspension of disbelief” that necessarily kicks in during the film if we are to be engaged and entertained by it at all: it’s just a movie, the movie itself announces to us . . . at the end! Another dimension of the effect is to acknowledge that in its entirety—despite all the trappings of “realism”—the movie is really a “romance,” a fictionalizing of “reality” that (as Nathanial Hawthorne puts it) “sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” yet it has “fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” At least that’s how I see it in a reflex response . . .

And I see it that way partly in light of my experience teaching Chet Raymo’s novel The Dork of Cork (and its film adaptation Frankie Starlight) this past semester. In the novel, the protagonist Frank Bois is the author of a memoir titled Nightstalk, of which his editor remarks: “I think the reader would have felt cheated by a happy ending.” That’s certainly how some of my students felt about the ending of Raymo’s book which frames Nightstalk. Some of them were quite unforgiving, despite Raymo’s embedding in the novel an analogue to the improbable relationship between Frank and the object of his childhood adoration, Emma. This analogue is in the form of a tale (ultimately from Chinese mythology) involving Vega the Weaving-girl and Altair the Herd-boy that Jack Kelly, Emma’s stargazing father, shares with young Frankie: “Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, at the height of summer, the lovers are allowed to meet when a bridge of birds briefly spans the stream of stars.” Unlike Simon Beaufoy, however, the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire, Raymo does not quite compose for himself the escape clause that Slumdog director Danny Boyle has appear on-screen in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” fashion:

D. It is written

Raymo’s novel begins with the sentence “Begin with beauty.” But it is really a novel about beauty and brokenness—even “ugliness”—as Frank himself articulates: “Beautiful and sinister. Jack thought I didn’t understand. But I understood. I was eight or nine years old, but even then I understood how beauty and hurt get jumbled up together. Even then I had seen how long are the shadows that beauty casts.” So when we see Frank and Emma—the Herd-boy and the Weaving-girl—at the end of the novel (and of Frankie Starlight) we might wonder whether the happily-ever-after ending of their narrative is really as “beautiful” as that afforded Jamil and Latika. Hmmm . . . Late in The Dork of Cork, Frankie may be speaking for his author when he muses: “I like the sense of completion, of tying up loose ends . . .” Slumdog Millionaire happens to tie up its loose ends with a dance sequence and a flowing yellow scarf!

BOOKIN' IT . . .

The Fall semester was busy, with a lot of heavy re-reading for my graduate seminar on the Modern Irish Novel: Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, John McGahern’s Amongst Women, Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie, and Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper. Still, I managed to read a few other books “on the side,” and now that a new semester is looming I feel the urge to “re-view” a few of those even while looking forward to what lies ahead.

At this point I’m not even sure in what order I read the books—but an appropriate set of bookends would be two that I re-read: Tom Perrotta’s Election, a fine comic novel that took me back to high school—I picked this up again in anticipation of my introducing Perrotta as the featured speaker at the Fourth Annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture at UMass Boston in early November; and Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, which I enjoyed once more in anticipation of starting my Recent Irish Writing course with Alan Parker's very fine movie adaptation of that novel. I also read Doyle’s new collection of short stories, The Deportees, an entertaining gathering of tales of “new Dubliners”—immigrants from around the globe who have dramatically altered the social texture of Dublin's fair city. Bringing back to literary life the central character of Jimmy Rabbitte, the title story is actually a sort of sequel to The Commitments. . . .

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I was drawn to the work of Andre Dubus last Fall after viewing a fine movie documentary on his life. I then plunged into two collections of his stories—The Times Are Never So Bad and Dancing After Hours. Plus I read Broken Vessels, a very compelling collection of his essays. Dubus is a writer who rewards the reader on every single page—rich and deep. . . . One of the commentators featured in that documentary on Dubus was fiction writer Tobias Wolff, so I decided to spend some time with his work as well. For years his novella The Barracks Thief sat unread on my bookshelf: prompted by his thoughts on Dubus, I finally took it down and gave it a good reading. I found it a very engaging narrative (though I have not quite figured out why Wolff shifts the point of view from third-person to first-person after the first chapter). I subsequently read his fine novel Old School, and I now have his collected stories on my “list” for future reading.

Somewhere in the midst of all that fiction, I detoured for a while and read Watermark, Joseph Brodsky's series of evocative meditations on Venice—on the physical as well as the metaphysical implications of a city built on water. Perhaps because he was a perennial visitor to that remarkable city, Brodksy did not quite register in this book the utter wonderment that I experienced in visiting Venice, all too briefly, for the first time two summers ago: I remember thinking . . . and saying aloud to my wife and daughters—and believing—"No one but Walt Disney could have imagined a world like this"!

I took at least one other detour into non-fiction in the form of When God Is Gone: The Making of a Religious Naturalist by Chet Raymo. I’ve read pretty much everything Raymo has written, and this coming semester I will be teaching his novel The Dork of Cork in my Understanding Literature course (and showing its film adapation, Frankie Starlight). My favorite of all of Raymo’s books, though, is Honey From Stone: A Naturalist’s Search for God. When I first read that book two decades or more ago, I thought, “you could make a religion out of the ideas in there”: in a sense, When God Is Gone is an “applied version” of the ideas and the implications of Honey From Stone.

Then I went right back to fiction, in the form of W. G. Sebald’s variation-on-a-theme narratives about German Jewish experience collected under the title The Emigrants. I was directed to this book by a colleague when I told him about another book I had just re-read (come to think of it): Timothy O’Grady’s altogether winning novel, illustrated with marvelous photographs by Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky. Like O’Grady’s novel, Sebald’s book uses photographs as a complement to the literary inscription of memory. I expect that at some point I will put these works into some sort of critical conversation with each other. (Disclaimer: although Timothy O’Grady and I are acquainted, we are no known relation to each other . . .) Those books incorporating photographs in turn led me to Michael Ondaajte's novel Coming Through Slaughter which, among other enterprises, circles around and about a photograph which includes legendary New Orleans cornettist Buddy Bolden.

In recent weeks I’ve been doing some prepping for the Spring semester and also a bit of writing. But I’ve still managed to read a couple of interesting novels. The first was Tinkers, by Boston-area writer Paul Harding. This novel has an intriguing premise—it registers the final and fading memories of a dying elderly man—and a compelling execution to match. Interestingly, the book was published by Bellevue Literary Press, an imprint of the NYU School of Medicine. . . . The other novel was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, which is of course in the news because of its high-profile film adaptation (which I have not yet seen). I loved the book. It’s certainly bleak—a representation, perhaps, of Thoreau’s observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”? But I was engaged from start to finish . . . and think of it as “right up there” with the work of Richard Ford et al. in its capturing of suburban male midlife angst. Sure, Frank and Shep are perpetual adolescents—and so is April—but so much of it rings true in a variety of ways. . . . As I used to conclude my “book reports” back in Junior High School: “I’d recommend it to anyone.”

FREEZE FRAME

This morning, flipping through the tabloids in the checkout line at the local supermarket, I had a flashback to an incident a few years ago when, following a pleasing lunch at Grafton Street in Harvard Square, I was suddenly “surrounded” by a photographer snapping, with paparazzi-like frenzy, photo after photo of me walking along Mass. Ave. Such audacity! Such an invasion of my personal space! And it only got worse (or better . . .) when passers-by began to slow down and gawk at the apparent celebrity in their midst. One person even stopped and called out to me, “Who are you?”

To my credit, I took all the attention in stride (literally—I was still walking), though if the episode had gone on much longer I might have been tempted to grab the photographer by the camera strap and fling both him and his equipment under a speeding bus . . . and that despite the fact that he was my lunch companion and good friend, Fionán O’Connell! (Check out Finn’s fine photographic work in his online gallery.)

Anyway, musing on that incident this morning, I had a hard time mustering up sympathy for all those real celebrities who complain constantly about being accosted by zoom lenses and blinded by flashbulbs: they should be pretty slow indeed to swat at the hand (or the head) of the very media that gave them their celebrity status in the first place. And they could have it worse. In fact, they could have the problem that I experience seemingly every time I get my photograph taken: the problem of “interlopers” stepping into the line of fire at what master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has described as “the decisive moment.”

This happens to me constantly. For example, about 5 years ago I was posing for a shot requested by a photographer when suddenly I felt a different sort of shot—a sharp elbow in the ribs delivered by legendary Boston Bruins power forward and NHL Hall-of-Famer Cam Neely. SMILE, he instructed me as he dusted off his knuckles. Clearly, I follow instructions pretty well.

Another time I was minding my own business (as always) when another fellow with a tough-guy reputation sidled up to me just as the photographer had me in his sights and said, "Do you mind . . . ?" "Oh, why not?" I said, and we shared a chuckle. After all, those were the good old days when Charlie Weis was still undefeated (0-0) as football coach at Notre Dame . . .

The worst, though, are the artistes—especially writers. I think it was 2004 and a couple of fine-looking women asked if they could have their picture taken with me at an event that I happened to be gracing with my presence. What could I say? I have a soft spot for the ladies. Well, I guess that Seamus Heaney and Chet Raymo do too, and somehow they became the raison d’être of this photograph. No fair!

Musicians, too, can be desperate lens hogs. For instance, back in 2005 I was hanging out in Dublin (I like to do that occasionally) when a fellow who identified himself as Rocky De Valera—what an unlikely name!—jumped into the frame and said, “Hey, didn’t I see you at the debut performance of my band, The Gravediggers, in the pub at University College Dublin back in 1978?” Well, maybe . . .

I like to hang out in NYC occasionally, too. And that was where jazz guitar maestro Gene Bertoncini leapt into the picture. So a quiet meal at Le Madeleine for me and le famille becomes a photo op for him. Sadly, that French bistro has since closed its doors; rumor has it that as the padlocks snapped shut Bertoncini exclaimed, “I brought down the house!”

But what really gets me is when a senior colleague interlopes into a private photograph. I guess it was 6 years ago, my 19th year at UMass Boston and Shaun O’Connell’s 38th, that I became aware of what he must be thinking: “Ha—you’re only half the man I am.” Yeah, well by the time this photo was taken, I had begun to catch up, if only by a small fraction each year.