Throughout A Death in the Family, Agee’s prose alternates between moments of simple and startlingly evocative description, as here, near the beginning of the novel . . .

He took his shoes, a tie, a collar and collar buttons, and started from the room. He saw the rumpled bed. Well, he thought, I can do something for her. He put his things on the floor, smoothed the sheets, and punched the pillows. The sheets were still warm on her side. He drew the covers up to keep the warmth, then laid them open a few inches, so it would look inviting to get into. She’ll be glad of that, he thought, very well pleased with the looks of it. He gathered up his shoes, collar, tie and buttons, and made for the kitchen, taking special care as he passed the children’s door, which was slightly ajar.

. . . and moments of unadorned psychology, as here, near the end:

I am aware of what has happened, I am meeting it face to face, I am living through it. There had been, even, a kind of pride, a desolate kind of pleasure, in the feeling: I am carrying a heavier weight than I could have dreamed it possible for a human being to carry, yet I am living through it. It had of course occurred to her that this happens to many people, that it is very common, and she humbled and comforted herself in this thought. She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is. She thought: now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race; bearing children, which had seemed so much, was just so much apprenticeship. She thought she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God.

I suppose this would put Agee’s novel somewhere in that line from modernists like Stein, Hemingway, and W.C. Williams (“No ideas but in things”) to the mid-century The New Yorker school of Raymond Carver and his minimalist disciples. What distinguishes A Death in the Family from those others, though, is the directness of Agee’s analysis and the complexity of his renderings.

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing…
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

While killing time in an airport bookstore last month, I picked up a new edition of Lolita and settled on a fun little project: This year I’m going to reread a few of the books that inspired me to become an English major way back when. I’m curious to see, fifteen years later, how my sense of the novels has evolved. So far, Nabokov is more impressive and Humbert is more disturbing than I remembered. Case in point:

“Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet ribbon. “Lemme tell you–”

“Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed — for goodness sake, to bed.”

I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.

I cheated by including a bit more than three sentences, but it seemed unfair to omit the final detail — Humbert pocketing the key and taking leave while waiting for the sleeping pill he had just fed to Lolita to work its charm.

- – -

Even at a length of just under 100 pages, Ron Austin’s In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts is four or five books in one, a quality that proves to be both an asset and a considerable stumbling block. Jumping hastily from theological aesthetics to film history to personal testimony, while also proposing a particular, collaborative approach to film production, Austin sounds an important wake-up call to inattentive consumers and creators of popular entertainment. That he moves too quickly at times, leaving certain parts of his argument in sketch form and making occasional factual errors along the way, is perhaps excusable in a book of this length and scope, but it’s a disappointment nonetheless. In a New Light is otherwise a significant little book—not to mention a pleasurably readable one—that reintroduces much-needed terms like “transcendence,” “imagination,” “empathy,” and “art” into a dialogue too often dominated, instead, by celebrity gossip, box office returns, and, particularly in Christian circles, simple moralizing.

Part one reads like it might have been written by Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, who rambles through the suburbs of post-war New Orleans while on “The Search” for some vaguely holy sense of permanence and wonder. For Austin, art should ideally be an open exchange between the artist(s) and audience, both of whom are “awake” and “attentive” to the sacred “present moment.” This is a moral and spiritual issue, he argues—one demanding a selfless and disciplined approach akin to meditation. The goal, ultimately, is to participate in a creative act that transforms our understanding of violence, human worth, and grace. “If a drama does not lead us to the discovery that our own lives are as enmeshed as those of the protagonists in desire and delusion,” Austin writes, “then we will either have to purge our complicity at the expense of someone else, or wallow in self-loathing and the despairing assumption that there is no way out.”

Austin fallows his opening treatise by spotlighting 13 exemplary film directors who “responded to the spiritual needs of the time by advancing the art form.” Beginning with the silent era (Charlie Chaplin and Carl Dreyer) and covering several important movements in film history (Italian Neo-Realism, French New Wave), Austin’s primer is a handy introduction for readers who are new to the spiritual tradition in cinema. As in the first section of the book, where Austin’s borrowings from scholars such as Martin Buber and René Girard necessarily oversimplify their ideas, here he again speedily glosses over the formal innovations of his chosen filmmakers. Devoting only a half-page to Dreyer while according six times that much to Eric Rohmer is an especially odd but typical choice.

Austin’s at his best when he positions a filmmaker in a particular religious or philosophical tradition (Jean Renoir and François Truffaut’s humanism, Ingmar Bergman’s existential despair, Robert Bresson’s icon-like photography), but his tendency to make idiosyncratic and hyperbolic pronouncements gets him in some trouble. Calling Bresson the “most truly avant-garde filmmaker in film history,” for example, would be difficult to justify, as would his dismissal of Jean-Luc Godard. While Austin acknowledges the Western-centric makeup of his list and drops the names of Asian directors Satyajit Ray and Yasujiro Ozu (who he incorrectly calls Sanjiro Ozu), the absence of world filmmakers can be felt here, as can the fact that the youngest artist he spotlights, Martin Scorsese, is now in his mid-60s.

While the blurbs on the back cover of In a New Light tout Austin’s professional résumé—his background as an actor who once worked with Chaplin and Renoir, and his time as a writer and director on network television—the real inspiration for this book, presumably, is his more recent experience as a teacher, workshop leader, and counselor. When, in the first appendix, Austin shares his “personal reflections on faith,” his writing becomes more assured and compelling. He identifies his readers as fellow media artists (directors, writers, actors, technicians, etc.), but his lessons are applicable to us in the audience as well. “What art, including films, revealed to me,” he confides, “was a unity deeper than the disunity of the discordant world around me.” That a film might inspire awe and curiosity in a viewer, rather than consumption and gross spectacle, is a surprisingly radical idea in America right now. With In a New Light, Austin offers encouraging, first-person advice to anyone who would desire to “wake up” at the movies.

My Favorite Don DeLillo Novels

1. Underworld — Generally speaking, I’m suspicious of novels this long, but Underworld, I think, achieves its massive ambitions. One of my few regrets about leaving academia when I did was that I never got to write my DeLillo chapter.

2. The Body Artist — Am I the only person who loves this novel? The Body Artist is short enough to be read in a single setting, which is the only reason DeLillo gets away with this strange little prose experiment about grief. My dream film adaptation would be Claire Denis’s take on it.

3. Libra — Of course DeLillo wrote a great novel about Lee Harvey Oswald. How could he not? What other subject would better encompass DeLillo’s obsessions with conspiracy, image culture, and American history?

4. White Noise — The only time I read White Noise I was still driving my first car, a 1986 Toyota Celica. DeLillo, as you might recall, turns “Celica” into a magically meaningless incantation, and I’ve loved him ever since.

5. Americana — I have a weakness for exuberant first novels, especially when they involve road trips and blindlingly bright metaphors.

Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield – I picked up a copy of Love is a Mix Tape after reading and really enjoying Fluxblog’s three-part interview with Sheffield. His book is a memoir of sorts. In the late-’80s, while a grad student in UVA’s English department, Sheffield met Renee, another music-obsessed writer. The two bonded over Big Star (“Thirteen” was the first dance at their wedding) and spent most of the next decade together. Then, suddenly and impossibly, Renee died. Maybe it’s because I’m so much like Sheffield — a book dork who spent too much of his life alone in his room listening to music before meeting a fiery Southern girl who (warning: cliche ahead) taught him how to love — but I ate this book up.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy — This is how cool the office where I work is: When I sent out an email suggesting that we start a reading group — an excuse to drink a few beers and enjoy the spring weather after work, really — and when I suggested that we start with Suttree, McCarthy’s Knoxville novel, nearly fifteen people jumped on board. At least one of them has already backed out (those first few pages are work, man), but I’m hoping a few of us will make it all the way through. I’ve decided that the idea for this little project came as a prompt from my subconscious, reminding me of the impending one-year anniversary of my escape from academia. I’m finally eager to read and discuss serious fiction again.

Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine by Mark Oldman — From now on, whenever anyone I know expresses even the slightest interest in learning more about wine, I’m going to send them a copy of Oldman’s book. It’s a collection of “108 shortcuts” and reads like something from the For Dummies series, except that it’s witty, practical, and genuinely informative.

Experimental Film Books — 2007 is my experimental film year, so I’ve been reading all around the subject, trying my best to coordinate the growing stack of books with my Netflix and GreenCine queues. After reading a bit about The War Game in Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, I dove into Peter Watkins’ films. Which in turn led me to the interview in Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema Vol. 2. And since that book also includes a conversation with Ross McElwee, I rented all of his films I hadn’t already seen. (Time Indefinite is so great, I cried.) And then that Kenneth Anger DVD collection came out, so I pulled out my copy of P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film, wich I’ve been dipping into as well.

Yasujiro Ozu Books — 2007 is also my Ozu year. I have a massive pile of films to watch and almost as many books. I’ve read about 30 pages each from David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and Donald Richie’s A Hundred Years of Japanese Film and Ozu.

JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.

HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.

JOE: No one was.

HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the covers with a knife.
Oh, boy. Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You . . . you know what I mean?

JOE: Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try too . . .

(He turns on the light. She turns it off again.)

HARPER: When you pray, what do you pray for?

JOE: I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

HARPER: Oh. Please. Don’t pray that.

JOE: I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling — just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m . . . It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

HARPER: In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. Terribly. That’s what’s so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can’t dream that away.

– Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Act 2, Scene 2

Tony Kushner is taken to task from time to time for his harsh treatment of Joe Pitts, the closeted, Republican, Mormon lawyer whose self-hatred motivates so much of the plays’ drama (and poisons his marriage to Harper). Those critics must ignore this passage, which is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking Kushner has written. It’s been at the very back of my mind for nearly a week now but came front and center earlier this evening.

So what is the prevailing opinion of Michiko Kakutani? After finishing Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, I dug up her review and was suprised to find a piece that is, at best, a witless and contemptuous hammer job. Previously, I’d known her only for her thoughtful reviews of “high,” “literary” fiction by the likes of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Don Delillo. She seems much more at home there, and is certainly more willing to give those authors the benefit of the doubt, not to mention the benefit of her full attention and energy.

That Kakutani dislikes Hornby’s book is just fine with me. I didn’t care for it too much myself. And, actually, scathing reviews are often the most fun to read, especially when the critic displays in abundance the exact qualities lacking in the art. Is anything more fun than watching a humorless spewer of banalities be pantsed by a clever critic? That’s not what we get in Kakutani’s review, though.

This plot summary fascinates me:

The premise of “A Long Way Down” feels like a formulaic idea for a cheesy made-for-television movie: one New Year’s Eve, four depressed people make their way to the roof of a London building known as Toppers’ House, with the intent of jumping to their deaths. One is a snarky former television host named Martin (think of Joe Pantoliano or a younger Tom Selleck in the role), who recently served a jail term for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. One is a long-suffering single mother named Maureen (think Sada Thompson), who spends all her time caring for her brain-damaged son. One is a foul-mouthed teenager named Jess (think Shannen Doherty on speed), who is constantly doing and saying wildly inappropriate things. And one is a geeky, wannabe rock star named JJ (think David Schwimmer), who’s aggrieved about his failure to become Mick Jagger or Keith Richards.

I recently read an interesting critique of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral that pointed out how, despite its being set amid the turmoil of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the novel, surprisingly, has no music in it. When Swede Levov sneaks into the bedroom of his radical teenaged daughter, he doesn’t find a stack of Jimi Hendrix and CCR records. Instead, Roth gives us scenes like the one in The Human Stain, where Nathan Zuckerman and Coleman Silk dance to big band music from the ’40s. Roth, the critic argues, seems to have stopped listening to new music just before Elvis hit the scene and, as a result, spoils ever so slightly the hard-fought authenticity of his historical recreations.

Judging by the paragraph snipped above, Kakutani seems to have lost touch with popular culture just before Elvis hit the porcelain floor of his Graceland bathroom. I had to look up Sada Thompson, best remembered as the mother on the Kristy McNichol TV series, Family (1976-80). And who is reminded of a younger Tom Selleck by anything these days, let alone by a novel set in contemporary London? With her anachronistic stabs at snark — really, who other than Robin Williams would think “on speed” qualifies as wit? — Kakutani comes off like a junior high guidance counselor with a comb-over (think Horatio Sanz in the “Wake Up Wakefield!” skits, natch).

I’d be fine dismissing the review with, “Well, Kakutani is clearly just the wrong person to review a novel by Nick Hornby, arch purveyor of all-things-hip-and-now,” except that her cluelessness has caused her to fundamentally misread the book. To picture Tom Selleck when you read A Long Way Down is not just . . . well . . . creepy, it’s objectively wrong. It’s like saying, “I didn’t care for Lolita. That Humbert Humbert guy reminded me of Alan Alda, and I just couldn’t picture Hawkeye doing that to a little girl.” (Not that I’m comparing Hornby to Nabokov, but you get the point.) Martin is bitterly, aggressively sarcastic; he’s world-weary, arrogant, and vain in the way only a disgraced host of a British breakfast program can be world-weary, arrogant, and vain. He’s Eddie Izzard. Or, if you’re a film producer with a lot of money on the line, he’s Hugh Grant the day after his encounter with Divine Brown or the drunken, mean-spirited Colin Firth of Where the Truth Lies. Martin wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Hawaiian floral shirt, Magnum P.I.-style.

The same goes for JJ, the American rock star whose band breaks up after a decade of just-south-of-mainstream success. I assume Kakutani calls him “geeky” because he’s the most introspective of the lot and because he adores the same serious fiction she does (JJ namedrops Delillo, The Sportswriter, and American Pastoral). Hornby doesn’t spend more than a sentence or two describing the physical appearance of his protagonists, but we’re told that JJ is tall, good-looking, and long-haired. He’s decidedly not-geeky, but I suspect that only readers who are attuned to Hornby’s codes can see it. “Putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people,” JJ says, and it works. Kakutani misses the call, but the girl JJ hooks up with for a one-night-stand doesn’t. David Schwimmer? Really?

And there’s another thing. Kakutani writes:

With the exception of Maureen – who comes across as truly disconsolate over her son’s plight – none of these people seems genuinely suicidal, or, for that matter, genuinely depressed. Martin is the sort of guy who jots down “Kill myself?” in a Courses of Action list. And Jess treats leaping off a building as another impulsive act – not unlike getting smashed and mouthing off at strangers, or having a high-decibel fight with her parents in public.

None of these folks seems to have given any thought to getting therapy, taking antidepressants or finding a practical solution to their problems. It never occurs to Maureen – who is not without money or friends – that she might get help in taking care of her son. And it never occurs to JJ that there might be a middle ground between making the cover of Rolling Stone and ending it all.

I agree with almost everything in the first paragraph, everything but the exception she’s allowed for Maureen, and Hornby would likely agree. They’re not suicidal; all four want desperately to live but can’t seem to find a way to manage. That’s kind of the point of the novel. I think. If they don’t seem “genuinely depressed,” it’s likely a result of Hornby’s decision to allow each character to tell his or her own story. Self-awareness isn’t a real strong suit for any of these characters, and Hornby isn’t one to dwell in sentiment. Rather, I like A Long Way Down best when we, the readers, are allowed the benefit of ironic distance, giving us a chance to see the self-destructive consequences of each character’s actions, even (especially) when he or she is unable to see them for him- or herself. There’s a nice scene near the end of the novel when the foul-mouthed teen, Jess, having reached her breaking point, finds herself alone on a street corner, smoking and muttering profanity. “It would be very easy for me to be a nutter,” she thinks. “I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life — I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes.” A lot in common, indeed.

What’s clear from Kakutani’s review is that she was unable to muster the slightest bit of sympathy for Hornby’s characters. How else to explain the contempt she shows them in that second paragraph — the way she so snobbishly dismisses “these folks” for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and finding a rational, practical “solution to their problems”? Clearly, Hornby is partly to blame for her lack of empathy. His narrative strategy is a gimmick that fails to work at least as often as it succeeds, and I likewise found myself frustrated and annoyed from time to time by the voices in these particular heads. (There’s a reason Vardaman’s chapters are so short in As I Lay Dying.) But Kakutani’s reading seems lazy to me. She’s misjudged these folks — not to mention Hornby’s intentions — and is punching herself silly, chasing after her straw men.

In a minute I’ll have some words about the book itself, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, but first I have to try to explain how strange it felt to stand in a bookstore and to feel absolutely no obligation to browse the fiction, drama, history, and literary criticism aisles. For the past seven or eight years, every trip to a book store has meant looking first for the titles I should read because my career and, perhaps, my identity (my sense of who I am/was) depended on it. In the final months leading up to my escape from academia I bought, began (with the very best intentions), and then discarded a whole stack of books, including Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, and Mark Kurlansky’s social history of 1968. I hope to finish them all eventually. I’ll certainly be a better-informed and more thoughtful critic and person for doing so. But it’s a relief to know I don’t have to read them or other books of their ilk, that I’ll never be tripped up in an interview or at a conference for revealing my ignorance of, I don’t know, late Foucault or something.

My dissertation work was in an area that I do genuinely find fascinating. Even just yesterday I got together with some friends for a lunchtime chat about Good Night, and Good Luck, and I was stung for a moment by the slightest twinge of regret as I launched into a breathless rant about the socio-political climate of post-WWII America and the making of people like Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy. I was enjoying myself, enjoying the unique pleasure of confident knowledge that comes from research and writing. I miss that.

But abandoning the dissertation has also made possible new and forgotten pleasures. Like the simple pleasure of being able to indulge, without guilt, the full scope of my curiosity. Maybe it’s just the passing of another birthday last week — 34, the first one so far that has felt in any way old — or maybe it’s the lingering effects of another recent read, Philip Roth’s ode to Death, Everyman, but recently I’ve become more conscious of how I regiment the hours of my life. I’ll get home tonight between 5:30 and 6:00, which gives me five good hours to get the living done. I’ll want to eat dinner and spend as much time as possible with Joanna. I’ll probably go for a run or mow the lawn. Then, around 9:00, I’ll get to do something that allows me to be more fully and completely myself. I’ll play the piano for a bit or listen to some music or watch one of the William Wyler DVDs sitting on my coffee table. Or I’ll read.

I think I’d like that to be my epitaph: “He indulged his curiosity, completely and without guilt.” I’ve been thinking about taking piano lessons again, for the first time in nearly 15 years, and I might sign up for a summer session French class. I’ve also been looking at this (I still have some birthday money to blow), and I’m checking around for introductory cooking classes.

Which brings me, finally, to Kitchen Confidential . . .

One of the few TV shows I try to watch each week is No Reservations, which is kind of like the old Jacques Cousteau series, except that, rather than voyages to the bottom of the sea, we instead join our host on a gastronomical tour of the world’s kitchens. Anthony Bourdain is the spitting image of John Cassavetes, right down to the NYC-born and -bred accent and attitude. That attitude, more than anything else, is the source of Bourdain’s charisma. He’s a fairly adventurous traveler and a reckless eater — the delight he takes in eating anything put before him wins him the instant camaraderie of every cook he meets, whether in a Paris bakery or a Moroccan hut — but he’s also sarcastic, foul-mouthed, unapologetic, and self-deprecating. He loves great food (and cigarettes and stiff drinks), and he hates bad food, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Bourdain got his Travel Channel gig on the strength and sales of Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 expose of the restaurant business. It’s actually as much a memoir as a behind-the-scenes tell-all. The back-jacket allusions to Hunter S. Thompson seem fair: Bourdain is more than a bit gonzo himself, and his writing is surprising enough and illuminating enough and funny enough to stand up to the comparison. He writes things like this (a snippet from a three-page tour of a cook’s anatomy):

At the base of my right forefinger is an inch-and-a-half diagonal callus, yellowish-brown in color, where the heels of all the knives I’ve ever owned have rested, the skin softened by constant immersions in water. I’m proud of this one. It distinguishes me immediately as a cook, as someone who’s been on the job for a long time. You can feel it when you shake my hand, just as I feel it on others of my profession. It’s a secret sign, sort of a Masonic handshake without the silliness, a way that we in the life recognize one another, the thickness and roughness of that piece of flesh, a resume of sorts, telling others how long and how hard it’s been.

That’s really nice writing. Even “in color,” a redundancy I’ve edited out of more than one technical paper over the years, works here, adding a short beat to the line before moving from the simple image of his callus to the clause that explains its significance. Bourdain, we learn in Kitchen Confidential, spent years as a struggling young cook, schlepping from kitchen to kitchen, earning and blowing more money than he deserved, indulging and, eventually, kicking a heroin addiction. He also went to private schools, including a year or two at Vassar, and spent childhood summers in France. That dichotomy is what makes his writing and his on-screen persona so engaging. He knows and loves “the life” and has the scars to prove it, but, without ever becoming detached or in any way condescending, he’s able to pull back just far enough to observe and describe a life that is so atypical — atypical, at least, to those of us who don’t work six or seven days a week, from the early morning hours straight through to, well, the even earlier morning hours.

Two nights ago, Joanna and I went back to Borders. (A new one just opened two miles from our home — cause for great celebration in the Hughes household.) I picked up a couple more books from the cooking aisle: Bourdain’s followup, A Cook’s Tour, and The Tummy Trilogy, a collection of Calvin Trillin’s food writing.

Anyone have a favorite food writer? Just curious.

“Darren Hughes’s contribution on Roth’s non-fiction writing, while far too short, is nonetheless a valuable addition to the mostly untrodden field of investigation of Roth as a critic.”
– from David Gooblar’s review of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, ed. by Derek Parker Royal

How’s that for the perfect end to my academic career? I got a good note in The Times Literary Supplement!

I really like this image, which I grabbed from a brief making-of featurette available on the DVD release of The Human Stain. Philip Roth isn’t a participant, really, but he does show up in this one shot — the very last shot of the featurette. He’s turning his head from left to right, I assume because he’s just noticed that he’s being filmed, and there’s a charming look of amusement on his face.

He’s chatting with Nicole Kidman, and Anthony Hopkins is also there in the room. As is Gary Sinise, who’s pretending for the day to be Nathan Zuckerman, a successful Jewish writer now sequestered and hard at work in an isolated cabin somewhere in the wilds of Thoreau and Hawthorne country. Roth, of course, has been pretending to be Zuckerman for nearly thirty years now. Come to think of it, this image could have come directly from the pages of one of his novels — somewhere, maybe, between Deception and The Counterlife: “Philip Roth” meets “Nathan Zuckerman” and all epistemological hell breaks loose.

The Human Stain is a little more impressive each time I read it. I’m still frustrated by the sadistic delight with which Roth degrades and destroys Delphine Roux, the 100-pound beauty of a French feminist scholar who, as it turns out, really just needs a good fuck from a virile classical humanist like Coleman Silk. And Les Farley, the deranged Vietnam vet, is never developed too far beyond the deranged Vietnam vet “type”; though, to Roth’s credit, Les does come to life — and then some — in one or two of the best scenes Roth has ever written, most notably the conversation between him and Zuckerman that ends the novel. But those are minor complaints, really. Of Roth’s writing of the last twenty-five years, The Human Stain, I think, is second only to American Pastoral in terms of ambition, formal invention, and sheer imaginative force.

I have no idea if Robert Benton’s adaptation of The Human Stain works on its own as a film. (The Almighty Tomatometer gives it a 41%, so consensus seems to be that it doesn’t quite.) Like the Tolkein-o-philes who continue to parse through every last detail of the Rings trilogy, I read Benton’s film as a vast intertext consisting of Roth’s many novels, his critics, the interviews, the essays, and my own evolving thoughts about — not to mention my imaginings of — The Human Stain itself. What I did last night barely qualifies as “watching a movie.” In the guise of objectivity, though, I’ll say this much: Nicholas Meyer’s screenplay streamlines the various storylines to focus more intently on the relationship between Coleman Silk (Hopkins) and Faunia Farley (Kidman), which seems a perfectly logical choice. He and Benton cut between the postwar promise of 1948 and the politically correct era of fifty years later with a fluidity that gives cohesion to both halves of Silk. And I was especially impressed by Wentworth Miller and Jacinda Barrett, who play the young Silk and his first love, Steena “Voluptas” Paulsson. Their too-brief scenes together restore a sense of balance and scaled-down emotions to a film in more need of both.

Adaptation is always, in some sense, an act of criticism, I suppose. Meyer and Benton, in close collaboration with their actors and crew, have in essence performed a close reading of Roth’s novel. For example, Meyer has chosen to keep Zuckerman as a narrative device — the author/detective who reconstructs “the whole story” — and Benton foregrounds that device by shooting most of the film from an objective remove. With only a few notable exceptions (Faunia’s discussion with the crow, for instance) the film is almost completely devoid of eyeline matches. When Steena dances for Silk, the camera stays near the back of the room, never allowing us to align too closely our own perception of the film’s world with Silk’s. This is an essential characteristic of Roth’s recent work, nicely transposed to the film.

But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions. (I love Roth most of all for his ten-page diversions.) But seeing the boxes in the film — those specific boxes, small, gold, hidden below her bed frame — became an essential moment in the development of Faunia’s character, more essential, I would argue, than Kidman’s overwrought monologue that immediately follows. They are present, like a memento mori, with a force that Roth’s writing never achieves.

An even more interesting example is Coleman’s last professional fight. Roth’s description:

Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was always dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he’s got, Silky, and give the people their money’s worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck You. I’m getting a hundred dollars, and I’m going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money’s worth? I’m supposed to give a shit about some jerkoff sitting in the fifteenth row? I’m a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he’s a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I’m supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman’s behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money’s worth. But you didn’t. I ask you nicely, and you don’t do what I ask you. Why’s that, wise guy?”

“Because I don’t carry no nigger.” (116, 117)

On the page, that scene is about Coleman’s arrogance, his intellectual superiority. Boxing, he tells his parents earlier, is a matter of outsmarting one’s opponent. The film, however, foregrounds the significance of Roth’s elision: “After the fight . . .” Benton chooses, instead, to shoot the boxing match Rocky-style, and so we are forced to watch the light-skinned Coleman, passing as a Jew, “outsmarting” his black opponent by beating him senseless. Not surprisingly, the rhythm of Wentworth Miller’s performance feels forced and awkward when he delivers the line towards which Roth’s prose so carefully builds: “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” On film, the words have been overpowered and made redundant by the force of the visual image. (I’m embarrassed to admit that, until I saw Silk fight, I’d never seriously considered the importance of Invisible Man — and “The Battle Royal,” specifically — as a precedent for The Human Stain.)