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Look back in anger and awe on the winter of 2015

Buffy looks pretty small there, doesn't she? Contrary to what Seinfeld teaches us, shrinkage is not always a bad thing. In the last few days, the snowbanks have finally begun to melt, and the insane winter of 2015 has begun to loosen its grip on our streets and our psyches, our lives. "Good riddance" barely begins to scratch the surface of our feelings, and it will be a while before the damage, literal and otherwise, is fully erased. I guess one reason I'm writing this is to try to put a frame around how bad it was, for those who weren't here or for the digital scrapbook. Slipping and sliding around neighbor Brian's first fire pit of the year on Saturday night, I realized we were finally going to have to come up with a new topic of conversation. There is, weirdly, a sense of anticlimax. Stockholm Syndrome for the season that held us hostage? We New Englanders love our dramas. We're prone to the sense that the fates are picking on us in particular, and the last time we grumped this much about it was before 2004, back when the Red Sox and we were cursed.

Here in Newburyport, we've felt even more singled out. Every weather forecast from late January through February seemed to put us in the ironically named "jackpot." We broke records for snowfall before Boston, with something like 110". They had the worst of it on Plum Island, which looks deceptively bucolic from my bed this morning, a pretty line of lights a couple of miles away on the eastern horizon. This article details the islanders' nightmare, often cut off from the mainland, their water and sewer system frozen, hungry coyotes roaming the streets. But it hasn't been a picnic on Boardman Street either. In fact, it was sometimes dangerous.

The endless shoveling, over and over and over. (Thanks again, Mike and Brian, for being so generous with your labor and your snowblowers. The storm's one upside has been the way most people pitched it to help those who needed it.) The shoveling-induced aches, pains and hospital visits. The parking ban that lasted, with minimal interruptions, for more than a month, resulting in endless jockeying and disruption of plans. The sheer mass of snowbanks that piled higher and higher, turning our existence into a sort of trench warfare, like a wintry version of Paths of Glory. (Kids, look out for plows when you're making that snow fort.)  Mail delivery canceled, trash and recycling going uncollected.The treacherous travel, by car or by foot, turning the simplest errand into an odyssey. Menacing icicles hanging overhead and ice dams sending meltwater leaking into houses. (Neighbor Tom hanging out our bedroom window again and again to make war on his eaves.) And scariest, we all have those modern furnaces with the low-to-the-ground exhaust pipes. Despite everyone's best efforts, for two different neighbors blocked chimneys resulted in pre-dawn carbon-monoxide emergencies on Arctic-cold mornings. And that was just on our block.

That picture of Buffy up top was taken in the Newburyport snow farm on the south bank of the Merrimack River, in Cashman Park at the foot of our street. On and off for weeks, our snowbank-narrowed, quiet little street was a route for convoys of huge dumptrucks heaped with snow from elsewhere in town and headed to the park. On our street, the mounds were so high, backyard fences no longer contained our neighbors' dogs. Roe thought one of them delivered the dead crab she found Buffy chewing on in our yard one day, perhaps lifted from their trash, but no one ate crab that week. Someone suggested it had been dropped by a seagull, a omen, a plague sign.

How thoroughly the snow and cold infiltrated and disrupted our daily existence. It's not a tornado or a Hurricane Katrina, of course. But it has also had economic effects, disproportionately hitting workers, as detailed well in this article. The Blizzard of '78 became a legend because of primitive meteorology that enabled its sneak attack, and conditions that created terrible flooding and wave damage along the coast. The winter of 2015 - with four tent-pole storms each dropping feet of snow - has the MBTA as its special sidekick, its accomplice. The transportation system's near-total failure made everything so much worse for so many people.

I started a new job in February, in Boston, and from the time it became a possibility, back in balmy December, I pictured myself taking the T on snowy days instead of driving. The day the extent of the T's collapse became clear (Feb. 3, the day after a storm) also happened to be my "final interview" at HR. My round-trip commute was something like seven and a half hours for what turned out to be a 25-minute chat, ending, happily, in an offer. But, intent on being on time, I took an early, early train on my frigid first day at the new job (Feb. 17, the day after a storm), leaving Newburyport at 7 a.m. only to arrive at Kenmore around 10 a.m., already an hour late for work and still more than a mile of snowy sidewalks from my new desk. I was standing in the huge and increasingly angry shuttle-bus line under the Citgo sign when I heard someone grumble in frustration that they'd just walk - and I looked over to see that it was my new boss. We got to work another half-hour of slipping and sliding later.

Naturally I spent much time my first couple of weeks writing about the shuttering and eventual re-opening of the T's street-level Green Line, which runs right past my office.

At this point, anticlimax looks pretty good.

One novelist leaves the scene, another arrives

RIP Robert Stone, one of the great American writers of the Vietnam generation. And hello Smith Henderson, who may or may not turn out to have a great career, but is, on the basis of one book, definitely the real deal.

Fourth of July Creek came out last summer, but only made its way into my hands recently. The Times review placed it in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, but despite the writers sharing a few tics - baroque violence, getting a bit carried away with poesy - it's not the best comparison. Fourth of July Creek is big and serious and excessive in the way of a certain kind of 1960s and '70s novel, such as Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers or Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. Like those books and many others of their era, it's a wide-screen, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink vision of a troubled America, seen through the lens of one sympathetic, formerly idealistic, deeply fucked-up guy.

Henderson's novel takes place in 1980, and while there are reasons for that, it could be set today with very little adjustment. Pete Snow is a 31-year-old social worker in remote Tenmile, Montana. He's hard-drinking and depressive, but so would you be if you were the sole representative of the state department of family services in a vast swath of mountain country with rich veins of domestic, alcohol and drug abuse, not to mention unemployment and poverty and isolation. Guns and dangerous dogs are everywhere. Pete has seen some stuff. He has problems of his own too; his father's an asshole, his wife's divorcing him and his teenage daughter hates them all. Also, his brother is a petty crook who beats up his parole officer and splits town, leaving Pete on the receiving end of the young lawman's escalating grudge.

Things get novelistic when Pete takes charge of 11-year-old Benjamin Pearl, who wanders into a local schoolyard one day...for the first time. He has grown up in the woods, a frontier child in a land with no more frontiers. Despairing of the "solutions" he can offer, Pete returns Ben to his father, who turns out to be a survivalist/hermit/visionary/lunatic - an all-American guy, in other words. Jeremiah Pearl is legendary in these parts, especially among the sort of folks who think our paper currency is part of the New World Order, Israel's rise a harbinger of the looming End Times. He keeps his family living off the grid and isn't afraid to aim his rifle at anyone who has a problem with that. But the two men form a wary friendship, Pete at first telling himself that he's simply doing what's best for the boy, keeping the lines of communication open, handing father and son canned food and new clothes. But amid his own miseries, there's something in Pearl's clarity of outlook that appeals to him.

Anyone who's read one of Henderson's forebears knows all this will come to violent grief. And the tensions never lessen much even through 480 pages of Pete's misadventures. These include a new romance and numerous road trips around the western two-thirds of the country in search of his now runaway 14-year-old daughter, whose troubling story we dip into as a kind of counterpoint. Henderson seems to be trying to show us everything that has gone wrong with the West. As with the Stone and Kesey books there are personal and political showdowns, public melees and bedroom struggles, a bit of mourning, an ocean of booze. Drink and drugs and exhaustion and the sheer vastness of the wilderness lead to surreal extremes.

The book shares its flaws with its predecessors, too. Henderson leaves nothing out. Every thread is followed up a box canyon or down a mountainside, into a fever and tremors. There are a couple of episodes, particularly a gratuitous bit of horror involving a downed power line in the wilderness, that seem intended to drive away the casual reader, anyone whose sympathy for Pete is imperfect.

The central mystery of the Pearl family is solved with brilliance, and a ghost-town showdown brings the plot's threads together in tragic perfection. That doesn't stop Henderson from going on to a final destination for Jeremiah and Ben that's less than convincing. The novel is an exhausting and occasionally infuriating trip, but it drags you so far into Pete's world that you'll be days hiking out. And isn't that what a big novel is supposed to do?

Kim Jong-ugh

"With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. ... We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all %@&# people." - George Clooney to Deadline Hollywood.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

I miss hearing the drags from our house in Exeter on Sundays. And I miss those adds on WRKO (680 AM). And I was sorry to hear of the passing of Dale Dorman, who introduced me to so much great music on that Top 40 station when I was a kid. And speaking of radio... you can hear me today on Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, which airs on  6:00 to 7 p.m. on WGBH (89.7 FM). I'm on for maybe half the show with Susanna Jackson of Dig Boston, talking about a bunch of arts stuff including the city's new arts chief and the Factory Theatre refugees.

Dystopian homesick blues

Things been running to the apocalyptic of late, from the elections and global warming to Ebola and The Walking Dead. So perhaps it's no surprise that my to-read list brought me two ballyhooed dystopian novels back-to-back, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and California by Edan Lepucki. (I'm also working my way through the Last Policeman trilogy by Ben H. Winters, but that's another post.)

I'm not the only one reading in the field of doom. Station Eleven is a National Book Award nominee, and California got a big boost when Stephen Colbert pimped it to support publisher Hachette in its fight with Amazon.

I'm glad I read Station Eleven before picking up Janet Maslin's unusually wrong-headed review. I'm also glad I read it before California, which might have put me off the whole genre for a while.

Superficially, the two books have a lot in common. Each pits its heroes and heroines against a cultish group that has turned to atavistic violence. They share that and a lot of other genre tropes with The Walking Dead and the modern giant of the end-of-the-world genre, Stephen King's The Stand. But neither one fits comfortably on the horror shelf.

The novel that Station Eleven most reminded me of is, in fact, Jennifer Egan's acclaimed A Visit from the Goon Squad, which despite a few futuristic touches was essentially a straight literary novel. Both play with time and the contrasting viewpoints of a web of interconnected characters. Both are about what you hold onto over the years, connections made and lost, the human version of the butterfly effect. If anything, Station Eleven seems a little less jaded than Egan's book, maybe because it's about the end of the world and not something really terrible like the music business.

(NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Station Eleven starts out as a middle-aged actor named Arthur Leander collapses while playing King Lear in Toronto, artificial snow falling down around him. A few folks gather in the lobby bar after he's been carted away, not knowing that his death is the least of the night's tragedies. Maslin chose the right lines to quote: Of all of them at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

Something called the Georgia flu has entered Toronto that same night, and not only the city but the world as we know it will be nearly wiped out. Mandel does deliver some action scenes as her characters cope with the catastrophe, but they're spread out through an otherwise almost delicate book that flashes forward and back from that night.

The bulk of the narrative takes place perhaps twenty years after the flu's arrival, when Kirsten, once a child actress in Leander's Lear, has become a leading light of the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group that brings performances of  Beethoven and Shakespeare to the scattered villages of the dystopian future. It sounds precious and it is, a bit. But there's something here of that final aria in The Goldfinch as well, a genuine sense of the importance of art to people trying hard to retain their souls. This is reflected in Kirsten's obsession with a comic book series about a lost world, which turns out to have been drawn mainly as a hobby by the first of Leander's three wives. Also tangled in the story are Jeevan, a papparazzo turned aspiring paramedic who tried to revive Leander on stage, and a variety of other characters, some of whom end up living at a midwestern airport where they were stranded by the flu, as if Walter Kirn's Up in the Air ended badly.

The novel's pulpier scenes include a few showdowns on the road with baddies dispatched by gun and arrow a la Walking Dead. But what's haunting here arrives without violence, such as a dying woman's last night on a Pacific beach, staring at the lights of a ghost fleet a few miles offshore. When you turn the final page of this poignant and surprisingly lovely novel, you'll know something has happened to you.

California, on the other hand, makes considerably less of its tale of hardy survivors, at slightly greater length. Cal and Frida have repaired to the Golden State's wilderness after society's collapse amid freaky weather and other vaguely described malfunctions. (The freaky weather doesn't follow them to the woods, oddly enough.) Despite their mellow, back-to-the-land 1970s-ish lifestyle, with sex as their main recreation, Cal and Frida's existence is fraught with loneliness and peril, which Lepucki sketches convincingly. Finally they venture to join a nearby commune hidden behind a Maginot Line of mysterious, giant, spiky sculptures.

The big reveal: The commune's leader is Micah, Frida's long-lost brother and Cal's college buddy, believed to have died as a suicide bomber back in the contentious days when the world was falling apart. His welcome is, mmm, complicated. This is one of those spooky villages where everyone knows something they're not talking about, and the smiling man at the podium has dark secrets. Cal and Frida have a secret too - she's preggo, and that could be a problem in the community, which is mysteriously free of children. Needless to say, shit eventually goes sideways.

Apparently Lepucki's book wasn't expected to do much before the Colbert endorsement. A Times feature says California "was assigned to an editor with almost no experience." It shows. Someone with a sharper scalpel might have cut away all the flashbacks about Micah and Cal's days at college and the blather about the mysterious group of prankster/terrorists Micah blew himself up for. These sections are vague and portentious and unconvincing, without much impact on the narrative. I suspect there's a lean, action-oriented version of Frida and Cal's story buried in here that didn't require so much backstory or even a previous connection to Micah. But unlike so many fictional proprietors of post-apocalyptic refuges, Lepucki was unwilling or unable to kill her darlings.

As it is, I had mostly lost interest in Cal and Frida's fate by the time they made it to one of the novel's fortified  "Communities," a clichéd Stepford-esque haven for the wealthy where they will be able to have their baby in peace and suburban contentment, as long as they don't ask too many questions. Give me the Traveling Symphony any day.

A few, no, a lot of words about Tana French

Not since the 1980s-'90s heyday of Ruth Rendell have I been as eager, time after time, for the arrival of a new book by a female crime writer as I am for each one by Tana French. Whether it's sexism or simply the type of stories they write, I tend to gravitate to hard-edged male writers like Ian Rankin or Michael Connelly. But French is the real deal, with a tag team of cops on her fictional Dublin Murder Squad stepping forward one at a time to take the lead in cases - and books - that are always different. She really switches it up from book to book, and does so again in the new one, her fifth, The Secret Place.

(Obligatory spoiler alert. Don't read ahead if you don't want to know stuff.)

There's no need for me to beat the drum for this Irish crime writer. She won the Edgar Award for her first, In The Woods, in 2007. That novel was a pulse-pounder about Detective Rob Ryan, who used his middle name to hide a secret; as a child, he was one of three boys who disappeared in a headline-making case, and the only one who came back. When a girl is killed in the same patch of forest where the boys vanished, solving the case becomes an agonizing struggle for Ryan. The girl's killer is caught by the end of the novel, but French leaves the detective's childhood mystery unresolved - with an ambiguous hint that the culprit was supernatural.

Ryan's near breakdown shattered his relationship with his female partner, Cassie Maddox. In French's next book, The Likeness, Maddox steps forward into the shoes of a dead girl who looked just like her, keeping her "alive" to try to  find out which of her creepy group of post-collegiate housemates killed her. Many detected a resemblance to Donna Tartt's The Secret History here, and I saw maybe a little Daphne DuMaurier too. Lotsa atmosphere around that big ol' country house, but maybe the thread of suspense got pulled a little thin.

Maddox's undercover supervisor in The Likeness was the tough, funny, duplicitous Det. Frank Mackie, who became the protagonist (and a suspect) in French's next, Faithful Place. Her most straightforward cop novel, it explores the brutal emotional realities of Mackie's youth in a literal dead-end neighborhood in a poor part of Dublin. The discovery of a long-missing suitcase suggests that Mackie's high-school girlfriend did not run away to England after all, as he thought, but was murdered instead. Mackie was and is a fascinating character, like a nastier, less trustworthy version of Rankin's grumpy Edinburgh hero, John Rebus. The only problem for me was that I guessed the real murderer on about page 50, strictly by plot math. But if The Likeness raised some questions about French, Faithful Place put them to rest. A lot of people say it remains her best.

The investigating officer on that case, a thorn in Mackie's side named Scorcher Kennedy, became the lead character in Broken Harbor, set in one of many unfinished housing developments left around Dublin by the collapse of the Irish economic boom. French brilliantly evoked the creepy atmosphere in this sad ghost suburb on the coastal plain, and her cops faced an absolutely insane crime scene. Was a family slaughtered by something from outside their walls, or a madness within?

Now comes The Secret Place, which finds a minor cop character from Faithful Place, Detective Stephen Moran, receiving a visit from Frank Mackie's now-teenaged daughter. She has found the photo of a murdered boy on a bulletin board at her exclusive little boarding school, with letters cut out to spell I know who killed him. The murder of Chris Harper happened a year ago, on the school grounds. Moran brings the card to the primary investigator on the case, Antoinette Conway, and she lets him tag along for the day. If they get a solve, maybe he'll finally make the murder squad, unless working with the unpopular Conway ruins his reputation with the old boy network.

And here's what French does different here - the entire investigation takes place in a single marathon day of interrogations and sleuthing at the school. Closely observed chapters about the detectives at work there, their subtle strategizing as they questions certain girls over and over, alternate with flashbacks to times before the murder, seen from the girls' point of view. And each of those flashbacks begins with a date-specific warning of the approaching crime: Chris Harper has three months, eleven days and seventeen hours to live...

It's a fascinating and risky two-track strategy to create suspense, and it must have been brutal to keep track of the two timelines. There are, mainly, eight suspects in the murder - Holly Mackey and her three close friends, plus a quartet of mean girls who bully them. These 15- and 16-year-olds are driven, intelligent, clever, sneaky and duplicitious, but also scared, naive, too often dreamy. They're conscious of the power of their sexuality but not always in control of it, especially when Chris and his friends from the boys' school down the road are around. It's a volatile mix and creates difficulty and hazard for the two detectives, all the more so when Mackey himself shows up to watch over his daughter's interrogation.

French is after something very specific and ethereal through these girls, a picture of that time in adolescence when your life is like a dramatic novel you're writing and you'll do anything for your friends - more so when you realize this time will soon come to an end. She chases it in long, sometimes mystical and often beautiful scenes as the girls push each others' buttons and roam the school's grounds illicitly at night. It's a little bit of that DuMaurier romanticism again, updated for 2000s adolescents. But there is also, daringly, I think, a touch of magical realism here, as the girls find a power in themselves to shatter a light bulb or turn a key. It may be intended as realism as their interpretation of events in a time of hysteria. Either way, fans of the gritty Faithful Place may find it a bit much, which is why I give French credit for having the courage to change it up from book to book and follow her muse.

The downside to The Secret Place is that the actual investigation hinges on so many tiny details it's Agatha Christie-esque, with three different lookalike cell phones getting passed around in a complex timetable. But this is all just a big MacGuffin to what she's really writing about, the love and madness of teen friendship and the sacrifice of growing up. Plenty of gorgeous writing here, and I can hardly wait to see what French does next.

Wyeth show at MFA: What we liked

I'll pass on the question of whether the Jamie Wyeth retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts (through Dec. 28) merits the prime real estate. The museum obviously thinks so, and Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, who I usually agree with, very clearly does not. But the exhibition is definitely worth seeing, even if you're not one of the masses who are familiar with Wyeth's lineage - his grandfather was the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, his father was painter Andrew Wyeth. There are some quite wonderful paintings here, and even some of the not-so-wonderful stuff isn't boring.

(Above, Jamie Wyeth at the MFA on June 23, with his Portrait of John F. Kennedy. Partial gift of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth and partial purchase. © Jamie Wyeth. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

The Wyeths' ubiquitous presence in 20th century American art has a slightly comic resonance in my family. For many years we harbored a vague and apparently false belief that we were somehow distantly related on my mother's side to Christina Olson of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World. When I was a boy my parents dragged me along on a visit to Cushing, Maine, to see the house in that bleak painting - what fun for a kid!

And my mother still grumbles when she catches sight of her copy of the large-format paperback catalog to an Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the MFA circa 1970; a visiting teenager with a pen scribbled a couple of phone numbers on the cover circa 1980, and the vandalism rankles her to this day.

Jamie is 68 now and due for a retrospective. This being Boston, they had to hang his posthumous Portrait of John F. Kennedy, which has just become part of the MFA's permanent collection. Wyeth was just 20 when he received the commission, and it's a fine portrait I suppose, but it seems rather much like all the other paintings I've seen of JFK, dignified and thoughtful yet sort of flat, as if any artistic spark was extinguished by the pall of tragedy.

It's a less interesting work, anyway, than Portrait of Shorty or Portrait of Helen Taussig, both painted, astonishingly, when Wyeth was just 17. These two pictures are vivid and alive and intense in character. Portrait of Shorty (below) applies his father's realism and washed-put palette, but has a rich weirdness all his own; it's one of the very best pieces here. There's also a portrait of Andrew Wyeth in which he wears a strange, monklike tonsure. It's a picture full of resonances that are hard to unpack.

Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth., Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

There was a lot of stuff here that I found meh at best. Other than Lou Reed, has there ever been an artist whose work was improved by hanging around with Andy Warhol? Wyeth's portrait of Warhol and his other 1970s pictures  are the exhibition's weak links, i.e. the rather pointless one of Ahhhhnold flexing. And who thought it was a good idea to include Wyeth's two tableaux vivant - dioramas, basically - of scenes from life chez Warhol? Bizarre.

After that, though, everything improves, as most of the work comes from Wyeth's beloved Maine coast or rural Pennsylvania environs. There's a constant push/pull between his desire for an idealized, "pretty"take on the rural past, exemplified in loving portraits of his wife, Phyllis, in period garb, often driving horses (Connemara Four) and a bleaker take that shows the shadow of his father's work (Head Tide-Maine). I'll take the latter, as the prettier pictures are sometimes nothing more.

But of course the best works are the most individual, which may touch on his father's rather grim view or his grandfather's storytelling, but always skewed just a little off what you'd predict. Sometimes this shades toward cute, as in the many affectionate animal pictures here or Pumpkinhead - Self-Portrait, which, sue me, I love. But Wyeth is at his best when he's ambiguous going toward dark. That means works like Orca Bates (below), a nude portrait of a adolescent Mainer with a whale's jawbone hanging over him; the jawbone reappears in a picture of Jamie's wife called simply Whale. The jaw is an artifact his grandfather might have made use of in illustrating some pirate tale, and the palette seems to be his father's, but the pictures are definitely his. The wristwatch!

Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Which brings us to the gulls. I am boggled by people who really dislike Wyeth's paintings of seagulls, a frequent  subject of his later work. He is quoted here as saying, "the eye of a gull, that's limitless, that's more the ocean than any big seascape," and that's exactly what comes across to me. The ferocity on display in his Seven Deadly Sins series, in Sea Star or even the oversized, off-species Raven presents slashing, staring, flailing nature that's red in tooth and claw and feels more like his own vision than anything else in the exhibit.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a painter friend here in Newburyport was taking the ferry back to shore after a visit to Maine's Monhegan Island when a black power boat rather abruptly crossed their bow. "That's Jamie," he was told. Wyeth's weakness, it seems, is that he's all over the place.

LEFT: Envy - The Seven Deadly Sins
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
2005
Watercolor and gouache on toned, hand wove rag paper mounted on archival board
*Private Collection
*© Jamie Wyeth
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ABOVE:

Artist Jamie Wyeth with his painting Portrait of John F. Kennedy in the Lois and Michael Torf Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on June 23, 2014. With art object: Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jamie Wyeth (American, 1946)
1967
Oil on canvas
*Partial gift of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth and partial purchase. © Jamie Wyeth. *Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Portrait of Shorty
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1963
Oil on canvas
*Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Orca Bates
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1990
Oil on panel
*Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

 

Stagecraft, performances elevate ART's 'Neverland'

I don't know how many of you know what a big deal the American Repertory Theatre's "Finding Neverland" is. Hollywood mogul harvey Weinstein has been trying to get it to Broadway for years, scrapped an entire English produciton of it, and has finally brought the ART's Diane Paulus on board to make it happen. They've got New York dates planned beginning early next year. I reviewed the opening in Cambridge for the Globe.

(Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva courtesy ART.)

Mark your calendars for a trip to the North Shore

As you may know, HubArts World Headquarters is in Newburyport and we pay special attention to the museums of the North Shore. The big news among them this year, hands down, will be the reopening of the renovated and modernized Cape Ann Museum, now set for Aug. 19. As our friend Keith Powers puts it, the Cape Ann is "Home to the greatest collection of Fitz Henry Lane paintings and drawings in the world, and the most sophisticated repository of the history of Cape Ann," so it's a big deal. The other big story around here is the ongoing development of the Peabody Essex Museum into a standalone art museum, vastly broadening its onetime mission to present the maritime history of the North Shore and the global trade and cultural exchanges that arose from it. On Sept. 6, the PEM will open a run as the only East Coast venue for Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in collaboration with the Calder Foundation. The exhibit of the iconic - a word not misused here - 20th century sculptor's mobiles, stabiles and maquettes - runs through Jan. 4.

Image: Blue Feather, c. 1948. Alexander Calder. Sheet metal, wire, and paint. 42 x 55 x 18 inches. Calder Foundation, New York. © 2014 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, NY.

Read it like this

Bret Anthony Johnston is the director of creative writing at Harvard, which seemed reason enough to check out his first novel, Remember Me Like This. It comes with good reviews, including one from the Globe, and a vague marketing patina of suspense. It's the story of what happens when a kidnapped teenager returns to his family after four years in the clutches of a pedophile.

For no very good reason I can trace now, I expected a literary thriller set in the tabloid heartland, a slightly more "respectable" version of Gone Girl. But Remember Me Like This is something else entirely, a quite serious and finely observed novel of a contemporary family trying to survive the worst of circumstances. While there is a bit of suspense - What parent of a kidnapped child hasn't thought of ending the kidnapper? - but the real tension here comes from the simple question of whether the Campbells can keep themselves together, individually and collectively. Their truths are more complicated than you'll find on any TV newsmagazine.

The first pages of the novel chart, perhaps at more length than than necessary, the build up to the moment when his family learns that long-missing Justin Campbell has been found alive, not really all that far from his home in a coastal Texas town near Corpus Christi. We see how his absence has haunted each member of his family, even as they continue to post flyers and search crowds of strangers for his face. His father, Eric, is having an affair and torturing himself with guilt. His mother, Laura, fears with some reason that she is losing her sanity, a feeling assuaged only in the overnight hours she spends as a volunteer watching over a sick dolphin in a rehab tank. His younger brother, Griff, loses himself in skateboarding, barely recognizing that a girl who's a friend would like to be his girlfriend. Also in focus is Justin's grandfather, a onetime tough guy, now an aging widower.

It should be happy news when Justin comes home, and it is. But it's complicated. Four years of awful loss cause  wounds that leave scars even as they heal - and many don't heal at all. Each member of the family shares only a part of their pain with the others, hoarding secrets, creating wrong impressions, drifting apart. On the surface, Justin is the least troubled of them all, despite four years of abuse and the threats and Stockholm Syndrome that kept him with his abductor even though he was gradually allowed to roam free. You'll find yourself rooting for him and Griff, and to varying degrees the adults in their lives, even as ideas of justice and revenge begin to take hold in some of their minds.