Stars and Travels

I read more newspaper comics and start reading a graphic novel. I watch a picture. I finish a new novel. A friend mails me a children's book.

Still reading FoxTrot: Assembled with Care for my daily newspaper comics helping. Not particularly nutritious reading; they go down easy. The public library also delivered a hold I’ve been waiting on with eagerness for a long time: Blood of the Virgin, the new graphic novel by Sammy Harkham, an immensely influential editor and thought-leader in the comics medium who is arguably the best long-form cartoonist currently working. Only a few pages into Blood of the Virgin; more on it down the line.

I watched a 1941 film written and directed by Preston Sturges called Sullivan’s Travels. This was on the advice of a reader who figured I should give another classic Veronica Lake picture a go since I mentioned recently having finally imbibed, and loved, her work for the first time in I Married a Witch .

She’s every bit as good here, though I had less fun with Sullivan’s Travels than I was anticipating. It’s a well-crafted picture by any technical and aesthetic measurement but I just didn’t fall gleefully and submissively into the story and dialogue as I so often do with favorite Golden Age pictures, for example in I Married a Witch or the Sturges screwball farce The Lady Eve, also released in 1941 and which I’ve watched twice.

Sullivan’s Travels is more ambitious and self-referential than those other pictures but with a looser, ziggier-zaggier story structure. Sullivan, played ably by Joel McCrea, is a successful Hollywood director who is tired of making comedies with no social importance during a time of such privation and upheaval and so determines to go out into the streets of America and live as a tramp so he can learn about the gritty details of life in shelters, encampments, rail cars and prisons. Since he is too valuable for the studio to risk any real harm coming to him, they determine to keep a close watch on him with a luxury chase vehicle packed with a support team. The humor is derived from three primary threads:

• For the first half of the picture Sullivan keeps thumbing his way away from Hollywood and yet keeps accidentally ending up back there.

• Sullivan keeps trying to ditch his support team so he can travel and learn unencumbered.

• He crosses paths with Lake’s character, a struggling Hollywood nobody who is preparing to give up and head back east anyway. They determine to travel together and a wisecracking love story blossoms.

Sturges here is out to skewer the realist social cinema of the Thirties. His point is that when people are dealing with hunger, unemployment and newspaper headlines blaring stories of genocide and threats of global war they don’t especially want to go to the movies to watch moralistic think pieces about those selfsame subjects. He’s chastising his self-important competitors for not making audiences clap and laugh while simultaneously attempting to do just that, a multitiered narrative feat of imposing difficulty. For this viewer it was message received, craftsmanship admired and genuine enjoyment muted. Sullivan’s Travels is an admirably well-made movie, just not my particular cup of tea. But if anything I’m even more madly in love with Forties Veronica Lake from the two of her pictures I’ve now seen.

I also finished reading Relentless Melt by Bushnell. Since I hardly ever read brand new fiction, let alone novels written by close friends (in fact I think a different book by this same friend is the only other one I’ve ever read), I’m in an unenviable position here of wanting to unpack this text but of not wanting to give away too much about a book the sales of which I would prefer to drive up on behalf of my good buddy.

In a way this works out because the coda is the only part I struggled with. Overall I dug Relentless Melt. I mentioned previously that I knew from the jump, both from the contents of the novel and from Jeremy’s and my civil disagreements about this fraught topic, that gender and gender confusion were going to be themes in this book. And for almost all of it I was pleasantly surprised by the deft and subtle touch with which all of this was handled — it felt incidental and matter-of-fact, which made it both more realistic-feeling with regards to a gender-nonconforming young female protagonist in 1909 and also let me enjoy the flow and twists of the narrative without feeling for a page or line like I was having a finger wagged at me. (Sturges would have nodded approvingly.)

Again, for the tape, I’m determined to see if I can thread the needle of making this comment without giving anything away, so here goes: Relentless Melt has a distinctly gratifying ending, followed by a coda that fairly drastically expands the boundaries of everything that has come up until that point. Narratively I found this arresting; morally I found it to be the only part of the book where Jez positioned several of his main points ahead of the telling of a good story. For this particular reader it makes no difference, although certainly doesn’t help anything, that these happen to be points with which to varied extents I don’t personally agree.

There’s also a linguistical choice in this coda sequence which made an already narratively confrontational section of dialogue even more hard to follow for this particular reader. This choice in the book’s closing is a mirroring conclusion to the first dozen or so pages of the novel in which Jeremy chooses, through the name of his protagonist Artie and other choices in characterization and phrasing, to lull us into thinking he’s writing about a male character instead of a female one. Structurally this is clever because it gives the text an unofficial prologue in which we as readers incorrectly assume that we know both Artie’s gender identity and sex, the bulk of the story in which it is subtly and artfully made apparent that these two attributes of Artie are not wholly aligned, and an epilogue-like sequence which determines to altogether elide such distinctions for protagonist and reader alike. Structurally, that is to say from the most zoomed-out critical perspective, I find this choice shrewd and interesting, but from the point of view of someone who wanted to know how the action of the story was resolved I found it more heavy-handed than I would have preferred.

Speaking of that story, there are a number of different traditions attendant in Relentless Melt and Jeremy does a convincing and engrossing job of making them all sit comfortably together in one medium-lengthed novel. (Three hundred and forty-three pages is pretty bang on for something you might want to bring on a summer vacation to the beach, or to the mountains, or to the historic districts of Boston and Cambridge where Relentless Melt is set.) Relentless Melt is a period piece, a detective whodunit, a story of best friends forgiving one another’s faults and supporting one another’s interests, a Lovecraftian nightmare about staring down a Thing Which Should Not Be, a coming-of-age tale, a subtle social comment, a Statement About Gender and arguably even a vague warning about climate change, albeit one that is at heart defined by a respectably optimistic belief in humanity’s collective ability to confront and deal with our problems as they arise, knowing that every solution presents new and more interesting problems. Again, I make no claim of prioritizing anything in this review above driving up book sales for my friend, so I would hope that the obliqueness of my analysis will pique everyone’s interest enough to compel you to either buy this book or to do what I successfully did, to lobby your local library to buy several copies. If anyone does want to weigh in and discuss or debate Relentless Melt with me, including that coda — our lines are open.

I’ll conclude this entry by mentioning one of the best children’s books I’ve ever read, The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer, illustrated by Ekua Holmes. This was sent to me as a gift by the same reader who suggested Sullivan’s Travels. (Two and a half years into writing this newsletter I have apparently arrived at the point where readers are now mailing me books to review. Let’s keep this going; touch base with me if you want to send me free shit.)

The Stuff of Stars is a beautiful large-format hardcover book about the time (or, well non-time) before the Big Bang through the early universe and into the development of stars, planets, life and, in Bauer’s phrasing, “You, and me loving you. All of us the stuff of stars.” Bauer’s writing evokes the awe and wonderment of this inconceivably strange universe in which we all dwell and strive without ever making recourse to religion, spiritualism or pseudoscience: she correctly groks that the state of our current knowledge about the origins of the universe, and the fact that we individuals are all indeed the stuff of stars, is more than enough fascination for any preadolescent reader who might find herself leafing through the pages of this eye-devouring book. Indeed this is a most felicitous author/illustrator partnership: Holmes’s illustration style, which fuses Pollock-like painterly abstraction with playful collage and a sophisticated flair for representational depiction, imbues Bauer’s words with the correct balance of the psychedelically sublime and the covetably relatable. This one is not to be overlooked.