Elia Kazan, The Understudy
Nov. 18th, 2004 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaPeople have expressed the opinion that (apart from the calls for MORE DEMI DAMMIT) I should write more about food, books, movies or RL - that is to say, all the things I haven't written about since I went on this animanga/music-fandoms-only bender. Fair enough, I think that myself. XD Books are sort of out because I've become one of those boring people who never read anything. There's also the aspect whereby the preceding statement is untrue (and not just because of the Japanese Series of Doom); I just haven't read anything for a while 1) that impressed me and 2) to the end.
But this is something I have to change anyway, because it Simply Will Not Do.
Actually... hmm. LJ-memories tell me that the last book I posted about at length was Seven Pillars of Wisdom back in late May-June. Sometime over the summer I read Elia Kazan's The Understudy, over the course of an afternoon or two, for no other reason than because I'd found it lying on the basement ping-pong table - that was a compelling read, then. XD It's very much not a genre novel, and thus difficult to summarize when one's out of practice talking about anything but plot twists and world-building. Grosso modo it's about a Jewish stage actor in the throes of a semi-midlife-crisis. He has a longstanding fixation on his mentor, a larger-than-life, diva-tendencied former Broadway star who's now past his prime and down on his luck. It's a combination of admiration, jealousy, disapproval and inferiority complex: he's more successful and in fact financially supporting his mentor, but has never been able to shake the (entirely justified) suspicion that the older man despises him for "playing it safe" in both art and life. He is, in other words, psychologically an eternal understudy. At the same time he has marital problems, the flashpoint being that his wife wants to move away from NYC because she feels unsafe (the book's set and written in the 70s). She's a rather complex character in her own right - very prim and bourgeois, loves her husband despite his profession, inclined to see inner-city blacks as The Enemy out to rape and pillage - but she started an affair with him while married to a banker she later divorced, and one eventually discovers that the love of her life was a boy she eloped with when they were both teenaged piano students, and he died tragically in an accident. ^^; It's probably simplifying it somewhat to say that the main character is torn between these two figures in his life and what they represent. There's also a lengthy digression in which he runs off to the brushlands of Africa and ends up observing his guide more than the other available wild animals - the man is a sort of control freak who's boxed himself into a certain worldview/philosophy and cannot let go, with eventual tragic results. In both the African and American contexts black people are discussed and presented as a sort of alien, anxiety-inducing Other, which does tend to make my eyebrows rise, especially since I'm not sure how the theme relates back to the rest. Or maybe drawing a parallel between ghettoization and apartheid is the point.
Of note, because the book is by Elia Kazan, is a late scene in which the main character testifies in court about his mentor's gangland acquaintances because said disreputable contacts went so far as to put his wife and stepchild in danger. In doing so he breaks the theatre people's unspoken code that one does not "rat out one's friends". Even though he believes himself entirely justified, he senses that the jury and audience are far more disposed to sympathize with his mentor, who of course refuses flamboyantly to testify; and in fact his own motives are somewhat in doubt (one senses that he's relieved to have a "good reason").
But this is something I have to change anyway, because it Simply Will Not Do.
Actually... hmm. LJ-memories tell me that the last book I posted about at length was Seven Pillars of Wisdom back in late May-June. Sometime over the summer I read Elia Kazan's The Understudy, over the course of an afternoon or two, for no other reason than because I'd found it lying on the basement ping-pong table - that was a compelling read, then. XD It's very much not a genre novel, and thus difficult to summarize when one's out of practice talking about anything but plot twists and world-building. Grosso modo it's about a Jewish stage actor in the throes of a semi-midlife-crisis. He has a longstanding fixation on his mentor, a larger-than-life, diva-tendencied former Broadway star who's now past his prime and down on his luck. It's a combination of admiration, jealousy, disapproval and inferiority complex: he's more successful and in fact financially supporting his mentor, but has never been able to shake the (entirely justified) suspicion that the older man despises him for "playing it safe" in both art and life. He is, in other words, psychologically an eternal understudy. At the same time he has marital problems, the flashpoint being that his wife wants to move away from NYC because she feels unsafe (the book's set and written in the 70s). She's a rather complex character in her own right - very prim and bourgeois, loves her husband despite his profession, inclined to see inner-city blacks as The Enemy out to rape and pillage - but she started an affair with him while married to a banker she later divorced, and one eventually discovers that the love of her life was a boy she eloped with when they were both teenaged piano students, and he died tragically in an accident. ^^; It's probably simplifying it somewhat to say that the main character is torn between these two figures in his life and what they represent. There's also a lengthy digression in which he runs off to the brushlands of Africa and ends up observing his guide more than the other available wild animals - the man is a sort of control freak who's boxed himself into a certain worldview/philosophy and cannot let go, with eventual tragic results. In both the African and American contexts black people are discussed and presented as a sort of alien, anxiety-inducing Other, which does tend to make my eyebrows rise, especially since I'm not sure how the theme relates back to the rest. Or maybe drawing a parallel between ghettoization and apartheid is the point.
Of note, because the book is by Elia Kazan, is a late scene in which the main character testifies in court about his mentor's gangland acquaintances because said disreputable contacts went so far as to put his wife and stepchild in danger. In doing so he breaks the theatre people's unspoken code that one does not "rat out one's friends". Even though he believes himself entirely justified, he senses that the jury and audience are far more disposed to sympathize with his mentor, who of course refuses flamboyantly to testify; and in fact his own motives are somewhat in doubt (one senses that he's relieved to have a "good reason").
