Tracy Letts, August: Osage County
Sam Shepard, True West
If you find yourself onstage in an American theatrical production, and one of the other people--not you--is playing a writer, buckle up, because you're about to have a bad time.
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
As you might expect, given the above, dignity was in short supply in the heyday of the American theater, preferring instead opulent tragedy, whether subtle or overdone. This is an exception.
(Like a lot of mid-20th century theater, it's easy to see what is innovative about it and hard to feel those innovations, because they're not new anymore.)
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
There was a bit of a split on prestige-type science fiction and fantasy properties about whether it was character or plot that carried them. This is as far as it is possible to go in the "character-driven + puzzle-box scenario + no answers" direction, and indeed as most of the contemporaneous and current reviews have it, it mostly works. At the end of it I was impressed with the pacing, the depth at which the character was drawn, and I was pretty willing to overlook a couple of deus ex machina steps--learning to read with only an alphabet and no guide, the luxe final surroundings, the continuation of electricity and ventilation. But it's hard to love a character whose chief characteristic is lacking normal human reactions to things, and one could easily and fairly conclude that the twists were just there to move the story along and there is no coherent idea behind any of it. I suspect there was or is meant to be a metaphorical level to the story but the details are too light on the ground to make it land.
Mimi Khalvati, Collected Poems
Poets tend to have one of two careers: early success and a slow petering out of ability as the ideas go away (call it "the T.S. Eliot"), or juvenilia and then a more or less consistent track record, with phases (call it "the W.H. Auden"). So Louise Glück is an Auden (but with a peak around The Wild Iris) and whichever terrible Boston poet I gave up on is an Eliot.
The reasons for this are straightforward: poetry has never been a moneymaker, and to have a career you either need to have early success that allows you to keep publishing to diminishing returns, or you need awards and recognition at a regular clip to keep publishers engaged, but should then deliver what people are expecting.
All of this is to say: the thing about Mimi Khalvati is that her poetry, always at least good, gets consistently better as she ages, to the point that her best collection is clearly Afterwardness, her most recent, and the second-best is the one published right before it, The Weather Wheel. Some of that is formal, experimenting with different meters and forms, including very traditional ghazals, before devising her own version of ghazals for The Weather Wheel. And some of it is experimenting with putting herself inside different characters and perspectives so that the poems about childhood in Afterwardness sound as lived-in and as correct as the "old lady" poems. Just a real joy and delight to read.
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Erroneously, I thought I had lived past the age when books taught me how to read them. But here we are. It's a picaresque novel and you already know the best parts; many chapters contain characters retelling a story about things that have already happened; Don Quixote will say something nonsensical, Sancho Panza will ask him to not do the crazy thing he wants to do, one or both of them will be severely injured, and there will be a joke about flatulence or excretion every 70 pages or so. I am holding out a lot of hope for Part II, where things supposedly get metafictional.
I had never read Cervantes and accepted that I probably never would, but this one was an obvious candidate to replace War and Peace in my "read a couple chapters every day and be done in three months" category.
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
I am, as they say, taking notes, though it's already been foreshadowed that Cresspahl does not make it out of WWII alive.
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