Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick

James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (2016) examines the history of the concept of time travel in popular literature and thought.  With a few exceptions, H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine introduced the concept of travel through time to the modern world.  Gleick discusses Wells’ novel in a perceptive way—he takes Wells seriously and sees the novel as a visionary work—even though Wells himself lost interest in the idea of time travel later in life, even though time travel itself (with minor caveats) is a physical impossibility. Gleick considers why time travel as a concept did not enter our thinking until late in the 19^th century: the impact of scientific thinking had a major influence on its appearance. He discusses the proliferation of time travel novels after The Time Machine and the importance of the concept in modern culture: films, television, literature. He is comprehensive in approach: that is, he explores every conceivable facet of his subject (at least I couldn’t think of any he’d missed). In the end, his book is as much a philosophical work as it is a discussion of history. Our preoccupation with travel through time reflects our preoccupation with death, our wish to escape or at least delay it. Gleick discusses how the idea of time travel raises the question of what time is, of how and whether it can be measured, of whether it has any meaning, of whether it even exists. The book is eminently readable and interesting.  It doesn’t bog down in technical language. Time travel offers Gleick the opportunity to engage in an interesting meditation on important aspects of the state of our culture.

The Word Exchange, by Alaena Graedon

The Word Exchange, by Alaena Graedon (Anchor, 2014), begins as a promising techno-mystery but quickly bogs down—into polemic, ever-incrementing layers of improbability, and inconsistent form. The first few chapters, about the kidnapping of an internationally famous linguist who is the editor of an American dictionary similar to the Oxford English Dictionary, and his daughter’s effort to find him, or to find out what happened to him, easily seize the reader’s interest.  But the narrative stalls and struggles when we find ourselves in a room deep in the basement of the American dictionary’s building where drone-like individuals, guarded by large and menacing attendants, are burning the pages of the third edition of the dictionary, even though it is about to come out.  This chapter reminded me of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Many other complications (too many) follow: a council of eminent men (and a woman) guard special secrets; a computer virus infects humans and causes partial-aphasia, its victims increasingly replace normal words with nonsense words; a company begins buying up all dictionaries in the world and charging people to look up on their smart devices words they have forgotten.  This same company begins changing the meaning of words on a whole-scale basis so that people have to look them up. People increasingly rely on an iPhone-like device (the Meme) that supplants what their brains would usually do. An even newer device (the Nautilus, that is implanted in the brain) is soon to arrive, and so on.

The apparently feminist hero of this novel worries a great deal about which man—a former boyfriend or an office colleague—both infected with the virus--she should care about most.

The Word Exchange warns of over-dependence on technology and the increasing hyper commercialism of our world.  Its world is post-capitalism run amok. Graedon apparently prefers that we read physical books and dispense with technology altogether.  She doesn’t like smart phones. Her novel is a right-leaning argument for the traditional humanities.  I support the humanities, reading (in any form), and the benefits technology can bring.  It’s true that technology—smart phones, the Internet, computers, you name it—are rapidly becoming extensions of our cerebral functions.  It’s right to be wary of over-dependence on them.  But it’s not right to let hysteria and paranoia rule the day. Despite the ingenious conception of this novel, improbabilities overwhelm it.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009), by David Grann, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, is about the British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, who played a major role in mapping uncharted regions of the Amazonian jungle during the first decades of the 20^th century.  Over the course of his career, Fawcett convinced himself that the fabled city of El Dorado (the city of Z), a place of vast treasures and gold left over from a native civilization of hundreds of years before, really did exist.  He made several expeditions to look for it and in the process had incredible adventures, encountered hostile Indians, some of whom he became friends with, fought off snakes, disease, and millions of insects.

Fawcett and others (including his wife) came to believe he was invincible. He was a stern man of unusual physical stamina who expected others in his expeditions to meet his standards of endurance.  Many of the men who worked for him hated him.  The rest would follow him anywhere.  Many of them died, unfortunately.  In 1925, he made his last expedition in search of the city of Z.  He took his 18-year-old son and his son’s best friend along.  They disappeared into the Amazonian forests, sent messages back to the civilized world for several months, and then went silent. They were never seen again, though Fawcett’s wedding ring turned up in a souvenir shop some years later.  Fawcett’s disappearance became the stuff of legend. It motivated other adventurers (including David Grann) to go into the Amazonian jungles to try to find out what happened.  All of them failed, and many disappeared—one estimate says at least as many as 100 died looking for evidence of Fawcett and his lost city.

Fawcett was a true-life version of Indiana Jones, but with serious defects.  He led many men to their deaths—including his son.  He abandoned his wife and family for long stretches of time and ultimately left them relatively penniless.  He exploited natives who helped him and patrons who believed in what he was doing.  He spent significant sums of money donated to his expeditions by the National Geographic Society. He represented some of the worst sins and excesses of colonialism, yet he was also a man of genius and courage (although foolhardiness and recklessness might be preferable alternatives to the word).

The Lost City of Z presents the tale of a fascinating and forbidding man.  It is a study in ambition, arrogance, delusion, the early history of South America, and of exploration. For reasons who enjoy in any combination stories of adventure, romance, mystery, deluded monomaniacs, and jungles, this book will satisfy. 

Deep Water Horizon

Deepwater Horizon (2016, dir. Peter Berg) is a smooth and effective procedural film about the 2010 Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  Beginning the day of the incident and ending the morning after, the film traces events and decisions that resulted in the deaths of eleven men and a terrible environmental disaster.  It blames the B. P. oil company: smarmy B. P. executives are shown as fat and leering baldheaded men with slow, ominous Cajun accents.  They’re interested mainly in the money-making potential of the well, and they pressure the managers and workers on the Horizon to ignore safety protocols and warning signs.  As many have observed, the B. P. company makes a good and even deserving villain.  But the film’s easy judgments about B. P. and its fat baldheaded villains gave me pause. Few disasters are that simple. The film itself shows a great deal of confusion among the workers on the rig as the pressure in the oil well begins to build—bureaucratic confusion as well as the confusion, miscommunication, and human errors that always accompany disaster, especially when it strikes in a massive way.  One character hesitates to initiate a process that would separate the Horizon from the burning oil rig.  Another orders a subordinate not to issue a “Mayday” call because he doesn’t have authority to issue it—this is well after the rig has exploded twice, a massive fire is underway, and all hell has literally broken lose. People misread instrument readings or ignore other warning signs.  When the film needs to place blame, however, it turns to B. P.  The heroes are the men who work on the oil rig. In reality, people on both sides of the disaster made mistakes, observed weak safety standards, were not adequately trained for emergencies, operated in an atmosphere of denial that nothing could go wrong.

In general, Deep Water Horizon gives a convincing and realistic account of the disaster.  The special effects are great. You can feel the heat coming off the burning rig. Mark Wahlberg performs well as everyone’s working class American Hero.  Kirk Russell is effective as the grizzled and gruff supervisor of the oil rig—he’s given an award for his safety record even as the disaster is beginning to unfold. This entertaining film shows the heroism of the men and women who rose to the occasion, some at the cost of their lives, when the disaster occurred.

I read two excellent articles about the disaster and its causes: “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” published in 2010 by the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26spill.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0#) --it was a source for the film, but more balanced and objective; the other appeared in Slate in 2016,  “Blame BP for Deepwater Horizon. But Direct Your Outrage to the Actual Mistake” (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/09/bp_is_to_blame_for_deepwater_horizon_but_its_mistake_was_actually_years.html).

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko

Mike Royko's 1971 book, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago is an account of the famous mayor from his birth up through the end of the 1960s. Royko was a leading reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune during the 1960s and 70s and later. He had much first-hand experience with Daley and events surrounding his administration. This is an extremely readable book. For people who were alive during the 1960s and who paid attention to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, this book will be especially interesting. It's difficult to imagine that people like Richard Daley could thrive or even survive in today's political climate in America. Having said that, I immediately must take it back, because Donald J Trump, our current president, is a much worse demagogue than Mayor Daley ever was. But I digress.

Daley was a consummate politician, which is not to say an honest one. He was dishonest. He used every political technique imaginable from personal payoffs to special jobs for people who did him favors or ensured that an electoral district would go his way. He threatened, blackmailed, and cajoled. Ultimately, he arrived at a point in his career where achieving his goals meant getting to do what he wanted. He resisted all challenges to his power. He became the equivalent of a feudal king, and Chicago was his fiefdom. He was ruthless and self-aggrandizing. His behavior during the 1968 Democratic convention was a prime case in point. It's amazing to read about a city and government and a political leader as corrupt as Chicago, its government, and mayor were during the 60s. For those who read the novel The Nix, this book will have special interest for those scenes that describe the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic convention.

Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty

Delta Wedding is Eudora Welty's beautiful 1946 novel about a family wedding. A wedding is one of those fundamental events in the life of a family that brings (or can bring) all the members together in a moment of peace and harmony and discord. Welty treats it as a moment that opens up the deepest consciousness of a family. The wedding is the superficial topic of this novel. The real topic is more complicated.

I love this novel, but it's deep and detailed and difficult. I can't claim to have understood it, at least not completely, though I began by the end to grasp what it is about. Welty is vastly underrated, even though she continues to show up in lists of the great Southern writers. Some people dismiss her, I think, because they see her as a genteel relic of an old South best forgotten. Not so. She was a keen critic of her life and times, not an apologist. At the same time she was a person of her times, and in writing about them she uncovered the deeply held beliefs of the mid-century American South.

Welty narrates this novel in an impressionistic, dreamlike, lyrical style that is more indirect than direct. In some ways we might think of it is an emotional style of narration, in which we come to know the characters more as emotional beings than as intellectual ones. My friend Hubert McAlexander compares Delta Wedding to a Virginia Woolf novel, and I wonder if he has in mind To the Lighthouse which also has at its center, at least in the first half, a woman who is the head of a family.

Delta Wedding is about the Fairchild family of Shellmound Plantation near a small town called Fairchild, Mississippi. The Fairchilds seem to be an upper-class family, not incredibly wealthy, but at least well-off enough to maintain a fairly large house and farm with servants and hangers on. Their importance to the community is reflected in the name of the town. We learn a great deal about them, the wars they have fought and sometimes died in, the people they have married, the places where they live, the occupations they pursue.

There perhaps are similarities between the family history of Ellen and Battle Fairchild and Eudora Welty's own family. Ellen Fairchild is from Virginia, as was Welty's mother. She moved to Mississippi to marry Welty's father. To a certain extent Ellen feels like an outsider, although after bearing nine surviving children by the time of the novel that's not a strong force in her thinking.

The novel opens with a focus on the 9-year-old Laura McRaven, and at first it seems she is going to be the narrative focus, the center of consciousness. In fact, although she surfaces frequently, and though we often are with her when important scenes occur, she's not always present. She's not the dominating center of the narrative. Instead I would say it's all the members of the Fairchild family, and perhaps more precisely it's the women members of the Fairchild family, especially Ellen Fairchild, the mother of the nine children and the wife of Battle Fairchild. Another key figure is George Fairchild, brother of Battle. He's much beloved by the family, is regarded as sensitive and giving and attractive, and also perhaps is a bit too sure of himself, also perhaps a bit arrogant.

As in her other writings, Welty uses objects and creatures of the outer world – in this case flowers, plants, and birds – as indicators of the inner life of her characters, especially of Ellen Fairchild.

The plantation's name, Shellmound, is a reference to Native American mounds somewhere nearby that signify in a loose way the people who used to live on the property that the plantation occupies years before white settlement. Similarly but more directly, the African-Americans who work for the Fairchild family and who live in the surrounding area are immediate descendants of the slaves who at the time of the novel had been free only for around 60 years. Probably the Fairchild servants are the children of African-Americans who were slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. Welty is not directly concerned with issues of civil rights or the treatment of African-Americans, but she does make clear the complicated history of the Fairchild family and the land they live on. African-Americans are important secondary characters: they observe but do not actively participate in the action. Interestingly, the only person in the novel who is heard to use racist language is Troy, overseer of Shellmound and the fiancé of Dabney Fairchild.

Certain plot motifs interweave: one is the impending marriage of Dabney to Troy. The Fairchild family regards this marriage as beneath Dabney because Troy is not of their social class. They are polite enough for the most part not to talk openly about this perceived social inequity, but it's clearly an issue, and it comes up in subtle ways. Another motif is that Laura McRaven's mother has died, some nine months before the time of the novel. Laura’s mother was the sister of Battle Fairchild. And her father, who seems to be a distant and uninvolved man, has sent her to the Fairchilds to attend the wedding. Near the end of the novel Ellen Fairchild invites Laura to come live with the family. It's not clear whether she will decide to do so—she thinks to herself that she will return to her father. Everyone is aware that Laura's mother has recently died, but they rarely talk about the fact, though it is alluded to now and then. We are also told that Laura herself has never wept over her mother's death though she occasionally thinks about her mother and at one point she and other members of the Fairchild family go to the cemetery and visit the Fairchild plot where she is buried.

Another interwoven plot motif, an important one, is the marriage of George and Robbie. George married Robbie sometime before the time of the novel. The family also regarded that marriage as beneath George, and Robbie is conscious of their opinion. She seems to be emotionally unbalanced and her sense of social inferiority governs her behavior. When we first learn about George he comes into the Fairchild house and announces that Robbie has run off. She does appear on the day before the wedding.

Most women in a social class and time such as that occupied by the Fairchild family would expect to be headed towards marriage. Some of the younger girls in the novel talk about who they will and won't marry. At one point Roxie and Laura vow that they will never marry. The fraught marriage of Robbie and George gives us the darker side of marriage, perhaps suggesting an unsettling future for Dabney and Troy. Although the marriage of Ellen and her husband Battle has been productive biologically (she is pregnant with a tenth child at the time of the novel), it perhaps is not the marriage Ellen would've chosen for herself, as a scene late in the novel implies. Welty uses marriage to comment and meditate on the freedom or the lack of freedom of the women in the Fairchild family and of others to choose their own destinies. It's also a way of commenting on the fact that those women who are already grown such as Ellen and who have already entered middle age are not free to determine the course in life they might take.

Delta Autumn is a lyrical stream of consciousness tone poem. Other than the fact of the impending wedding, it has no real plot. Small narrative entanglements previously commented on work themselves out. The wedding takes place without incident. The guest who have arrived depart and the family members who don't live at Shellmound disperse and the story concludes. This novel is about the life of the Fairchild family, the consciousness of the family as a group together, and as a group of individuals apart. I had thought this would be a difficult novel to teach. However, when my Southern literature class read and discussed the novel in the spring of 2017, they found it fascinating. 

La La Land

The title La La Land (2016; dir. Damien Chazelle) denotes L. A. Land—Los Angeles Land, home of the American film industry, the setting and subject of this film.  La La Land also denotes fantasy, extreme fantasy verging on craziness, as when we say that someone who isn’t quite with it lives in La La Land.  These meanings all apply to this film.  It invokes romanticism while at the same time subverting and tearing romanticism down.  It pays homage to earlier musical fantasies (to films in general, with its somewhat off-kilter nods to Rebel without a Cause—neither of the main characters are rebels) while at the same time discarding them and trying to offer something new.

The two principal characters—an aspiring actress and an aspiring jazz pianist—are ambitious.  They want careers in the La La Land of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.  They’re not quite prepared to fall in love, but they do.  Love and careerism intersect, conflict, combust.

I admire the fact that this film was made.  It’s a mature and adult film, a serious musical in an era that doesn’t have much room for deviations from the prevailing norms.  It never took fire for me.  Only one or two of the musical numbers came alive.  You could almost see Emma Stone counting her steps—one, two, three—in the dance numbers.  But that’s all right.  Neither Stone nor Ryan Reynolds was supposed to be a stereotypical character in a Hollywood musical.  They’re imperfect, their dancing is entertaining but not on the level of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly—that’s still OK.  This film is about normal individuals, not spectacular Hollywood sensations—normal in so far as aspiring actresses and jazz pianists can be normal.

The opening scene—with people stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam breaking into song and dance, was misleading.  It seemed contrived and artificial and didn’t prepare for the film and story to follow.  It reminded me of the musical Rent.

The final scene—an extended what-might-have-been fantasy dance and musical number—is plaintive and sad.  (It’s also manipulative and predictable). We can all identify with it in one way or the other, speculating over different paths our lives might have taken, in the end recognizing that the one we did take was all for the best.

The Lady Vanishes

Fast, witty dialogue is a defining virtue of The Lady Vanishes (1938; dir. Alfred Hitchcock). Although it's a mystery film, with people under various forms of menace, and though it includes gunfire, kidnapping, and murder, it's also quite humorous. Dialogue is one source of humor. Stereotyped characters are another. The stereotypes are mainly ethnic: British, Italian, German, and perhaps East European—I wasn't certain about the last. Most of the film takes place on a train, and among the various passengers are a man and woman who've had an affair, two British gentleman traveling to a cricket match, a doctor, a countess, an Italian magician, a dowdy middle-aged woman (who disappears), and various others. Some humor comes from people of one nationality not being able to understand the language of another.

A young woman traveling to meet her fiancé shares a compartment with a middle-aged woman.  When the older woman disappears, the younger woman takes it upon herself to find out what happened.  No one believes her that the woman has vanished.  In fact, no one claims to remember having seen the woman at all.  As the young woman’s investigation develops, the mystery deepens, and so on.

The story reflects the crisis in Europe as political affairs in Germany and Italy continue to worsen—although neither is mentioned, Hitler and Mussolini are in power, and the prospect of war is in the atmosphere of the film.

Hitchcock’s fascination with human faces, with an array of often eccentric and funny characters, plays into the humor of the film.

Portions of the film, especially early scenes, are fairly risqué for the time. There are also elements that are difficult to interpret, given the year the film was made and the year in which I watched it.  In one scene, the two cricket fans are forced to share a single bed while waylaid in a hotel in the Alps: we see them in bed together, in what I have to say is a cuddled-up position: one of the men has his shirt off.  The other, when he gets out of bed to answer the door, is wearing a nightshirt and no pajama pants. In 2016 we'd conclude the two men are gay, but I suspect that in 1938 most audience members (except perhaps gay audience members) would not have thought much of it, other than to find it humorous.

Uncle Tom's Children, by Richard Wright

Uncle Tom's Children (1938, 1940) was Richard Wright's first major publication. Its final version included five stories and an essay entitled “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."  The stories are almost minimalist in style. They rely more on dialogue than exposition, and in this sense they’re reminiscent of Hemingway. Wright uses a lot of dialect, and for some readers this may make the stories difficult, though reading the dialect aloud makes the meaning clear. In three of the five stories the main character is an African-American man struggling in one way or the other against the oppression of a white supremacist society. In the other two stories a woman is the central character, though in one of them, she is more ancillary to a male character—her husband—than she is the main agent.  Only in the final story does a woman function as a true protagonist. The last two stories of the volume are clearly a product of Richard Wright’s interest in Communism. They suggest that the Party can effectively organize people in pursuit of a common cause, though one of them has a dark, pessimistic conclusion. In the fourth story, “Fire and Cloud,” a minister named Taylor, who is timid about allying himself with his black parishioners or with communist organizers or with the white power structure of the city, comes to realize that only group action that brings together both white and black victims of the oppressive power structure will bring about social change. In the final story, “Bright and Morning Star,” a mother who has lost her two sons to the struggle for equal rights and the Communist Party in turn sacrifices herself by shooting to death an informer who threatens to give the names of key members of the Party to local police. The story’s dark ending suggests that Wright had begun to lose faith in Communist ideology. This final story marks an advance in Wright's ability to construct a narrative and describe characters convincingly. It relies less on dialogue than the first four stories. At the same time its use of Communist Party rhetoric and advocacy of goals and methods of the Party denies the story a certain spontaneity: events seem predetermined and forced.

One can identify in some of the stories foreshadowing of the style Wright employs in his great novel Native Son (1940). The use of images of whiteness, for instance, look forward to Wright's use of the white water tower at the end of Native Son as a symbol of the oppressive white world that Bigger Thomas lives in.

These stories are interesting for what they show about Wright's developing artistry, but they are not largely successful. Many scenes could have been better shaped and shortened. The stories are often flat. In dramatic power, the second story "Down by the Riverside" is the most effective in the volume. This account of a man struggling to protect his family in the midst of the great Mississippi flood of 1928 is sad and powerful. His wife has been in labor for three days, his mother doesn't want to leave the house that is surrounded by water, a friend brings a stolen boat in which he takes his family across the river to the town in search of a doctor to help his wife, he is forced to shoot the white man who shoots at him: all of these factors play into the overall meaning of the story and the hopelessness of the main character’s situation.

There is a naturalistic purity to these stories. Wright’s characters struggle against impossible circumstances, and what makes the circumstances impossible is the white racism of the world in which they live. Happy endings, with one notable exception ("Fire and Cloud"), don't occur.

I'm unaware of group demonstrations in the 1930s that ended as happily for African Americans as the march in “Fire and Cloud."  Although Wright may have intentionally sacrificed realism for the sake of suggesting that mass actions are the only way to bring social change, the story still doesn’t seem plausible for the 1930s. However, it does look forward to the demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s that finally began to bring about civil rights for African Americans in the United States.

Singin' in the Rain Revisited

One summer afternoon in 1955 I was visiting my grandmother at her house in College Park, Georgia.  I was five.  My grandmother indulged my every whim.  I’d often heard her and my mother singing or humming the tune “Singin’ in the Rain.”  I hadn’t seen the film, but I knew the tune.  It began to rain, a light drizzle, but rain nonetheless.  I don’t remember whose idea it was, but my grandmother and I went out into her side yard and began singing and dancing in the rain, to the tune from the film.  Although she lived for another thirty-five years, this is one of my strongest memories of my grandmother, singing and dancing in the rain.

It would be many years more until I saw the film that carried the song’s title.  I loved it the first time I saw it, and I’ve loved it every time I’ve seen it since.  Singin’ in the Rain (1952; co-dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly) and I don’t have much in common.  I’m not a singer or a dancer and never had real aspirations to be in “show business.”  But watching that film returns me briefly to the momentary joy of that memory I carry of singing and dancing with my grandmother in the rain.

Singin’ in the Rain  has three great stars: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds.  They’re all dead now, as are virtually all the people who had anything to do with the film.  It was made in the early heyday of technicolor.  It marked in many ways the height of the Hollywood musical, although later musicals such as Oklahoma and Westside Story would make better films.  Singin’ in the Rain isn’t even very coherent: it’s a comedy, a satire of Hollywood and the days of silent film and the coming of sound, a love story.  It makes fun of the egotism and ambition of Hollywood stars.  We think of it as the film that gave Debbie Reynolds her start.  In fact, it was the only significant film, and the only truly good film, she ever made.  But that’s no matter.  She didn’t need to make another film, although she was in many others.  She gives the film purity and energy and youth and exuberance.  Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor are wonderful dancers who make the best they can of every minute in which they appear.  She keeps up with them, step for step. The highpoint of the film, the Broadway Melody sequence towards the end, has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the film, but that’s no matter either.  It’s a great sequence.

My favorite sequences are “Moses Supposes,” “Gotta Dance,” and “Good Morning,” the last of which features Debbie Reynolds in the best performance of her career.  It is sad that she died.  Everyone must.  But few will live on as she will live on in this greatest of Hollywood musicals.

Star Wars: Rogue One

Like all of the Star Wars films, Star Wars: Rogue One (2016; dir. Gareth Edwards) marks an advance in the possibilities of digital technology. The special effects are spectacular. The use of the planet killer weapon was chilling. While in the first Star Wars film from 1977, the weapon caused the planet merely to blow up in an explosion of sparks and flames and noise, in Rogue One, when the weapon is used to destroy cities, the thermonuclear blast that ravages the landscape for hundreds of miles around is overwhelming.

Digital technologies and the possibilities they afford have raised certain questions that are under debate by reviewers. As to whether certain characters resurrected from the past after 20 or 50 years look real and convincing, I don’t have a strong opinion. Peter Cushing has been dead for 20 years, so when he appeared on screen as Grand Moff Tarkin, commander of the Death Star, I knew he was a digital effect. He looked real enough to me. Another effect at the end of the film happened so quickly I hardly had time to examine it. Some reviewers regarded it as transparently artificial. While I did feel there was something unusual about it, it worked well and offered a poignant and moving image with which to end the film, especially given recent events.

As digital technology has advanced it has become possible to put numerous complicated effects on screen simultaneously. This is both a benefit and a challenge. Sometimes Rogue One is a bit too busy.  At moments so many things are happening that it is difficult to keep up.

Let there be no doubt: the film is entertaining. Although it took me a while to figure out who the different characters were and whose side they were on, I enjoyed the film and was often on the edge of my seat.

Star Wars: Rogue One is dark, perhaps the darkest of all the Star Wars films so far. Unless I missed something, any sequels will certainly have a cast of new characters.

The Statue and the Fury: A Year of Art, Race, Music and Cocktails, by Jim Dees

The Statue and the Fury: A Year of Art, Race, Music and Cocktails, by Jim Dees (2016) is the memoir of a reporter's experiences as a rookie journalist in 1996 and 1997 working for the Oxford Mississippian in Oxford, Mississippi. After losing his job at the University of Mississippi, Dees turned to the Oxford newspaper in hopes of another vocation. He was 40 years old. The central focus of this book is about the efforts of the mayor and the city council of Oxford to erect a statue of William Faulkner, who lived in Oxford until his death in 1961.

Faulkner is actually a side-interest of this book. Although he is memorialized in the statue, he's not what the book is about. Rather, it's about small-town politics. It's about how Dees finds Oxford to be a quaint, eccentric, and also in certain paradoxical ways progressive small southern college town. I did not learn anything new about Faulkner from this book, and in fact a lot of what's presented as fact seems to be gossip and hearsay. We run into people who were according to their own testimonies Faulkner’s doctor or bootlegger. We have to take such information with grains of salt.

We learn a lot from this book about small-town politics, about pettiness in the ambition and the corruption of small-town politicians. I think Dees started out with the expectation that he would find Oxford a weird and off-the-wall town. He found what he wanted to find. The book is focused on a year which Dees takes as indicative of the pressures of the modern world on Oxford to expand, to build its infrastructure, to encourage tourism, and to take advantage of such attractions as it has on hand, such as Faulkner’s reputation. In the course of the book we run into other people who visit Oxford or who perform in nearby Tunica: Willie Nelson, James Brown. We learn a bit about Larry Brown the writer, and less about the writer Barry Hannah.

The Statue and the Fury has a fragmentary quality: it moves back and forth from reminiscences of people who knew Faulkner to discussions of the furor over the statue to interviews with country music stars to accounts of the visit to the town of the rap group 2 Live Crew and the controversy caused by their performance at a local nightclub. In general the book explores a small town grappling with its Southern heritage and seeking to move, tentatively, into the contemporary world.

Jim Dees was probably a good reporter, but he certainly took sides in the controversies he covered. He's an example of a person who sets himself in the company of famous writers and musicians and others as a way of certifying his own significance in the world. That's not such a bad thing. A lot of us do that.

The Likeness, by Tana French

Tana French’s second novel, The Likeness (2008), depends on the premise that one person can successfully, or almost successfully, pretend to be someone else. In this case, we have the detective Cassie Maddox, an important character in French’s first novel, In the Woods (2007). When a graduate student in English at Trinity University in Dublin, Ireland, is found stabbed to death in the ruins of an old farm cottage, police undertake an investigation to determine who murdered her and why. Coincidentally, the murder victim, Alexie Madison, is identical in appearance to Cassie (this coincidence, on which the entire novel depends, is difficult to swallow). Alexie lived with four friends in an old mansion outside of town. Rather than tell them that their housemate is dead (they are immediately identified as suspects in the crime) detectives send Cassie in undercover to take over the identity of Alexie Madison.  The hope is that she can discover who committed the crime.

The novel thus poses a curious question: can one person who looks exactly like another person of an entirely different background and history pretend to be that person? The novel assumes that this kind of impersonation is possible. I don't believe it. When Cassie appears at the mansion after having supposedly spent a week in the hospital recovering from the stabbing, her friends appear to be glad to see her. They assume slight differences in her behavior are the result of trauma and amnesia suffered in the crime. Over a period of six weeks one of them becomes suspicious. Cassie is not the only person in the novel who assumes alternative personalities.

French writes well. But her plot is overdeveloped, and she fails to explain away occasional false leads. The revelation of the true murderer is a letdown.  The dénouement of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), which French has identified as an influence on her second novel, was also a letdown. As in her first novel, an individual with a psychopathic personality plays an important role.  Once again, a police detective becomes psychologically over-involved with the crime under investigation.

When Cassie Maddox determines who committed the crime, she doesn't tell her colleagues. Rather, she allows someone else to take the blame—someone who is already dead and who therefore can’t be arrested. The true culprit and the housemates who protect him aren’t prosecuted. This is supposed to compensate for the guilt Cassie feels for having taken advantage of the housemates. It's not enough for me.