Drift

Someone is walking somewhere from someplace else—so begins an Eric Rohmer movie. Two secretaries in an office chat about nothing in particular; mail is sorted; a boat is at sea. The pointless opening is crucial for establishing the rhythm of these movies, and what happens as they unfold is not that events get more exciting but that the pointless events grow richer in meaning.

These movies capture the formless sequentiality of life, which moves us along until we find ourselves somewhere other than where we thought we were, or thought we might end up. Jean-Louis's conversation during My Night at Maud's feels like those real late-night sessions, mostly in college, which you can never plan in advance or later quite recall; in The Aviator's Wife, after hours of brooding and planning and anticipating the effects of what he has to say to his girlfriend, François never dreams that one thing he says will make her defensive, another will make her jealous, and a third will make her cry, so their talk shifts back and forth and it bewilders the boy, and perhaps the older woman too. Rohmer's understated theory of the relations between the sexes is nothing more than this: men and women drift farthest, and fastest, and most mysteriously, in their dealings with each other. Read More

Lately I've read, as you probably did too, about the profits gained by Wall Street firms through "flash trades" executed on the basis of information received thirty milliseconds before being shown to traders generally. There is also a lot about Twitter in the news: its hacking by the enemies of a Georgian professor, its possible use by NFL players during games. Something I did not learn from the newspaper—I had to be told by a friend—was that the Marxist political scientist Giovanni Arrighi had died, on June 18 of this year. There was no obituary in the Times, any more than there had ever been reviews of Arrighi's books while he lived. Read More

Having demonized Lytton Strachey in The Voyage Out (1915) by making the purportedly straight character based on Strachey misogynist, Virginia Woolf treats him rather well in Jacob's Room (1922). Not only is Richard Bonamy, the decidedly gay character based on Strachey, not misogynist, he's the hero Jacob's fondest friend, just as Strachey himself had been to Virginia's brother Thoby. He's also someone with whom Woolf seems to identify: it's Bonamy, after all, who's left alone with Jacob's mother in that suddenly empty room and to whom, holding out a pair of shoes, she poses that suddenly sentimental—and unanswerable—question: "What am I to do with these?" Or at least I find the question sentimental, almost unbearably so—which for me happens to be a good thing, and which is why I cherish it more than any other finale in prose fiction. Read More

Late in the spring of 1976, the writer John Cheever was roused by a phone call telling him that his friend John Updike, twenty years younger and far more prolific, was dead. Cheever began to cry. Trying to distill his thoughts in print before first light, he mourned the passing of a "prince"—a colleague "peerless as a writer of his generation." Updike was at that point 44, with some twenty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism to his name. Only one had received a major prize. Eight years before, Time's cover had framed his likeness with the slug "The Adulterous Society," lauding Updike's artful portrayal of "the pampered, wayward millions of today." Cheever, in other words, was not being sloppy when he chose his prepositions. Updike's legacy in 1976 was not so much about his rank in the generation. What stood out then was how he'd written of it. Read More