Hannah Gersen

An Island Refuge

A few weeks ago, I visited Roosevelt Island for the first time in over six years. The aerial tram was crowded when I boarded and everyone had cameras ready as we began our ascent over the East River. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought the skinny little island east of Manhattan would be a good place to enjoy one of the first sunny weekends of the year.

But as a former resident, I found the number of tourists baffling. Roosevelt Island is probably the most boring neighborhood in New York, a place with pretty river views and not much else to see or do. Historically, it has been the site of a prison, an asylum and a quarantine hospital, and when I lived there, I sometimes had the feeling that my neighbors and I were exiles of Manhattan, people who just couldn’t hack it, for one reason or another.

Continued at The New York Times

Revisiting The Last Days of Disco

Last night I attended a screening of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco at BAM, part of a film series curated by Lena Dunham. It was followed by a Q&A, moderated by Dunham, with Stillman, (whose movie, Damsels in Distress opens today) as well as Chris Eigeman, who stars in Last Days, and also has a role in Dunham’s forthcoming HBO series, Girls.

From here on out, I will refer to everyone with their proper honorific, in the spirit of formality that pervades Mr. Stillman’s films. Re-watching Last Days, I was struck by how polite his characters were. Even when insulting one another, they speak in complete sentences, rarely use profanity, and offer to fetch one another drinks afterwards. I also forgot how funny the dialogue was. There are so many good one-liners, including what may be my favorite non-apology of all time: “Anything I did wrong I apologize for, but anything I did not do wrong, I do not apologize for!”

It takes a special kind of actor to pull off Mr. Stillman’s dialogue—one who, first of all, can get all the words out, and second, can say them earnestly, without self-consciousness. Mr. Eigeman sets the bar for this kind of delivery, but during the Q&A he surprised everyone by saying that he was not originally slated to play Des in Last Days, and that a bigger star had been tapped for the role. No, no, Mr. Stillman said, that wasn’t true; Des had been written with Mr. Eigeman in mind. “I thought you had cast someone who bailed at the last minute!” Mr. Eigeman said. “That was just a ruse,” Mr. Stillman said.

Having cleared up that 14-year misunderstanding, Mr. Eigeman stumbled into another one, after informing the audience that Mr. Stillman abhors rehearsal and does not indulge actors who “like to do their homework”. Actually, that wasn’t true, Mr. Stillman said; in fact, during the filming of Last Days, he often rehearsed lines with Mr. Eigeman’s co-star, Robert Sean Leonard.

Ms. Dunham’s film series, entitled Hey, Girlfriend!, features movies that focus on female friendship, so she tried to get Mr. Stillman to talk about the acidic, competitive friendship between Charlotte (Kate Beckinsdale) and Alice (Chloe Sevigny) at the center of Last Days. “You call that a friendship?” Mr. Stillman said. Then he went on to explain that the film was inspired by his love of dancing, not any particular interest in female friendship. He wanted to film girls dancing at discos, because “discos are cinematic”, and it followed that the girls dancing would have to know one another and have some sort of relationship. He also wanted to create a female counterpart to Mr. Eigeman’s character, a highly opinionated and somewhat abrasive fellow, and to have those two characters end up together. “It’s a bit plaid on plaid,” Mr. Stillman admitted, “but it appealed to me.”

I always like to hear filmmakers talk about the origins of their work because of the way they can boil it down to just a few images. Girls dancing, plaid on plaid. That’s the mood board for Last Days. It was also interesting to hear Mr. Stillman talk about the fashion choices he made when filming Last Days, which is, in its own way, a period piece. He said he didn’t want to be too constrained by the reality of disco fashion, which he considered rather abysmal, so he set the film in the early 1980s, when disco really was dying—if not already dead—and people were beginning to dress in a way that he liked. I have to admit I am partial to the clothes in this film, especially Chloe Sevigny’s outfits, which are very Annie Hall, albeit a bit more prim: lots of oxford shirts, knee-length skirts, and sensible shoes. At one point she even wears penny loafers.

The crowd at Last Days seemed to share Mr. Stillman’s sartorial tastes. Lots and lots of blazers, ties, plaid, high buns, oxford shoes, oxford shirts, and even a few pocket squares. Perhaps the crowd was especially articulate, too. Before the screening began, the young woman sitting behind me earnestly described the previous night’s dinner in detail, a feast that included sable cream cheese, roe, artisanal carrots, and gnocchi poached in tobacco water. She stumbled only when trying to describe the dessert. “I really didn’t understand it,” she confessed. Listening to her, it occurred to me that the foodie scene, with its over-analytical vocabulary and mannered restaurant going, is ripe for Mr. Stillman’s satirical voice. But since Mr. Stillman’s characters all seem to subsist on the preppy diet of olives, tonic water, and spreadable cheese, I doubt we’ll see him sending up Brooklyn culture anytime soon. Still, one can hope… 

Review: Mrs. Nixon

I reviewed Ann Beattie’s most recent novel,Mrs. Nixon, for IDIOM. Somehow, I ended up writing about David Shields:

In his 2010 manifesto, Reality Hunger, David Shields attacked realism in fiction, calling upon writers to give up the ideal of the purely imagined novel or short story. Too much fiction, he argued, is written as if modernism never happened, and remains bound to nineteenth-century narrative conventions of plot and characterization:

I love literature but not because I love stories, per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived and essentially purposeless… It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking +

The above words are Shields’, but much of his book is a collage of other writers’ unattributed quotations, lifted from a variety of sources, including novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and journalism. Urging writers to steal more boldly, Shields invited authors, novelists in particular, to consider the kind of autobiographical and “realistic” forms that modern readers gravitate toward — memoir, personal essay, lyric essay, narrative journalism — and to meld these forms with traditional techniques in order to create new hybrid works:

The books that most interest me sit on a frontier between genres. On one level, they confront the real world directly; on another level, they mediate and shape the world, as novels do. The writer is there as a palpable presence on the page, brooding over his society, daydreaming it into being, working his own brand of linguistic magic on it +

I bring up Shields because when I first began to read Ann Beattie’s most recent book, Mrs. Nixon, I thought I was encountering a hybrid book of the Shields variety…

(Continued at IDIOM)

A Novelist Imagines Arcadia

Three-year-old Beckett Kallman has just figured out that his mother, Lauren Groff, writes novels.

“It’s a very strange feeling for him,” Ms. Groff said, in a telephone interview from her home in Gainesville, Fla. “When I put him to bed, he asks, ‘Can I read one of your books?’ And I say, ‘Not yet.’”

Undoubtedly, it will be even stranger for Beckett when he discovers that his mother’s second novel, Arcadia(Voice, 304 pages, $25.99), the story of a boy growing up in a Utopian commune, is dedicated to him. And perhaps even stranger when he learns that the little boy in question was inspired by his birth.

Continued at The New York Observer…

Review: Jack Holmes & His Friend

Photo: Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1971, via NYPL

Over the years, the novelist, memoirist, cultural critic and literary biographer Edmund White has been vocal about his decision to write from a gay perspective, for a gay audience. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, he became more firmly devoted to this audience, helping to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and publishing his breakthrough autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story, about growing up gay in the Midwest. Ironically, it was only as he began to focus more exclusively on gay themes that his work became known to straight audiences. In his recent memoir, City Boy, Mr. White wrote about the creative liberation that occurred when he realized, in the late 1970s, that he could create groundbreaking work simply by mining his own autobiography: “A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks.”

Continued at The New York Observer

The Tale of a ‘Fashion Terrorist’

THE novelist Alex Gilvarry was in the midst of a fashion emergency. Perusing the racks of Oak, a trendy boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he looked for a sweater to cover up a mustard stain on his plaid shirt. In a few hours, he would speak to M.F.A. students at Hunter College, his alma mater, and he didn’t want to look like a slob.

(Continued at The New York Times)

Review: The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding would make the perfect graduation present. That’s not to imply that one will necessarily outgrow this novel, only that it is preoccupied with the sort of questions most of us first grapple with in early adulthood. What are my ambitions? Who are my friends? What counts as success? The charm of this novel is that it approaches these concerns as earnestly as its college-aged characters do, but without the same angst. To put it another way, The Art of Fielding lacks pretension. With its short sentences, short chapters, and simple themes, The Art of Fielding is a novel unafraid to use what one character describes as, “those big little words: love, work, art.”

(continued at Tottenville Review)