A: Is Harold Pinter dead?
B: He is dead.
A: Are you sure?
B: Yes, I’m sure.
(pause)
A: Well, who will fill his shoes?
B: I will fill his shoes.
A: You will fill his shoes. Are you a playwright?
B: No.
A: No?
B: No. Nobody can fill his shoes. I could fill his shoes if I were a playwright. But I’m not.
A: You know, the thing I suspect you’re getting at here is that Harold Pinter was unlike anybody else. But on a more literal level, I suspect you may have shared his shoe size. Assuming that you pay attention to feet. Specifically, the feet of those who contribute significantly to culture. Does anybody really know what Harold Pinter’s shoe size was?
B: His wife. The Nobel Committee maybe. I’m sorry for suggesting that I could fill his shoes. That was unintentional hubris on my part. I obviously knew that Harold Pinter was dead longer than you, and I’m still grieving.
A: Maybe they’ll offer Harold Pinter’s shoes at an auction.
B: An auction?
A: Yes, an auction. It seems the best place to consider Pinter’s legacy.
B: Will they begin selling off Pinter’s scraps of paper?
A: Maybe they’ll hold the funeral at an auction house. And there can be a little sniveling man crunched down under the bier offering work that hasn’t yet been published.
B: Work that hasn’t been published?
A: Work that hasn’t been published, yes.
B: At an auction house?
A: The publishing industry may not work this way, but maybe.
B: Oh, that’s wonderful.
A: If you’ve got the cash, perhaps.
B: As it so happens, I don’t have the cash. And I’m still a bit sad about Pinter dying.
A: I’m sad about Pinter dying too, although you wouldn’t know it from my morbid sense of humor.
B: Sometimes, a morbid sense of humor is just what it takes to take in the passing of a legend.
(pause)
A: You like the idea?
B: Not really. But we can argue about it over a game of tennis, old chap.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
The authentic intellectual Left is dying off; may Chomsky live to 120.