New Year, New Stack

And this year, the stack is absurd.

January began by finishing last year’s books: Joan Didion’s most excellent The White Album, which followed Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Discovering the holes in one’s literary history is fascinating: I must be the only member of my generation that didn’t read Didion in college. Or high school, as one of my children did. Didion takes the personal essay and marries it to the memoir in a style that is so wholly her own that it simply takes your breath away. The New Journalism meets modern California. An added bonus: you just happen to be watching Season Three of Amazon’s Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton, and the plot revolves around water use in California’s Central Valley. Didion was writing about this in the late 1960s.

The move to Clifford Thompson’s What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues could not have been more timely. Thompson bravely took on the 2016 election and decided to examine what happened to race relations in America through the lens of Joan Didion. A perfect choice, as Didion’s New Journalism did what no journalist had done before: inserted themselves into their non-fiction writing. No longer was the voice that of the detached observer; now the feelings and experiences of the writer were, for the first time, allowed to enter into the narrative. As a writer and man of color in America, Thompson looked around after the election and simply began to question everything. He took his incredulity several steps further and courageously sought out voters for the current president to find out their side of the story. His travels, interviews, and questioning of everything, including his own viewpoint, paint a portrait of an America that may no longer be as recognizable as it once was. Or was it? That’s the complexity that Thompson steadfastly tackles.

When it comes to books, I am not a quitter. It’s the Capricorn in me. I push and push, and might give up for a while, but I always come back. Last year’s literary version: The Bolter (Osborne). This year’s? Mrs. Osmond by John Banville. A Christmas 2018 gift from a dear friend, I started it last winter and quickly tired of the oh-so-19th century language, multiple dictionary-requiring vocabulary words, and slow progress of the protagonist, Isabel Osmond (née Archer) through the various European capitals that took her away from her recently crumbled marriage. Where was she going? What was she doing? I happily put it down. And then, this year, I picked it up. And how glad am I that I did. First off, some context: Banville brilliantly picks Isabel up after she’s been left off by her creator, Henry James, in the Portrait of a Lady. My mistake? I didn’t honor this context. Also, I’ve never read any James (another hole). As I continued, I slowly started to see the genius of what Banville had done: he had elevated fan fiction to an art form. 

Oh, an honorable mention has to go to Nick and Nora. In my family, The Thin Man is required cinematic viewing every New Year’s Eve. Completely by accident I discovered another hole: I had somehow missed the 2012 publication of Return of the Thin Man, two novellas that Hammett wrote for the two Thin Man cinema sequels, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. These do not disappoint: witty, acerbic and charged with those trademark Nick-and-Nora quips, The Return of the Thin Man was the perfect way to ring in the new year.

Phryne and Jack

“One night I was sitting around watching The Thin Man on TV,” begins a monologue on Myrna Loy. Although I wish I had written this line, this could be true of me on any given night.

Myrna Loy, the smart and stunning actress of the 1930s, got to shine as Nora, to William Powell’s Nick, in The Thin Man Series, based on Dashiell Hammett’s eponymous murder mystery. Although made into a film series (Hammett only wrote one Thin Man novel), starring the successful Loy/Powell brand, the first two, for my money, are the most superior, with sumptuous sets, killer costumes and an etched-in-memory cast of character actors. A young James Stewart even appears in The Thin Man Returns as a man-about-town in 1930s San Francisco.

In the monologue, written by the late humorist Cynthia Heimel, Loy is lionized as the perfect role model for yearning young women trying to figure out the dating scene of the 1980s and ‘90s: “When in doubt,” Heimel writes, “act like Myrna Loy!”

Loy, in Heimel’s mind, is the cinema’s response to the 1920s flapper, a young woman who called her own shots. “Consider Myrna in the movies,” Heimel writes. “A real pip. Witty, self-possessed, adventuresome, wore great hats. This is good stuff.”

There was a time when you could easily fall into the “they-don’t-make-‘em-like-that- anymore” lament of our parents. Then came the new television. And with it arrived Phryne Fisher, lately of Melbourne, Australia.

“The voltage of that unresolved relationship” said author Kerry Greenwood “I don’t remember writing it that well.” She was speaking of the making of Miss Fisher (of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) for television and Phryne’s relationship with Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, who, like Nick, in The Thin Man, initially sees a female as simply getting in his way, when trying to solve a murder. But Miss Fisher is no ditsy dame, she is accomplished, intelligent, and multi-lingual. Indeed, Jack not only comes to rely on her; he falls hard for her, as well.

What The Thin Man, and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries share in common is a celebration of the male-female couple as one, working together towards a common goal, in this case solving crimes. While, initially, there is certainly a sense of the male trying to assert his power by getting rid of the “little lady,” what elevates this genre is the emerging realization that the female is equal to him in talent and ability. And then there is the essential 1930s staple, snappy dialogue and witty repartee:

“One night I was sitting around, watching The Thin Man on TV, and William Powell had just put Myrna Loy into a cab. She thought he was getting in beside her and they were going to catch a murderer but instead he told the cab to take her to Grant’s Tomb and the cab sped away, containing an astonished Myrna. When her darling husband later asked her how she liked Grant’s Tomb…she just said, nice as you please, “It was lovely. I’m having a copy made for you.”

The Miss Fisher writing and production team knocked it out of the park with the series; can’t wait to see what happens with Phryne and Jack in Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, the feature film, coming out later this year.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/2/12/18221978/miss-fishers-murder-mysteries-movie-crypt-of-tears-acorn-tv