It’s about three mothers and their sons—the sons are all in their 30s and haven’t amounted to much. The mothers have been friends since the sons were toddlers, and have decided that each one of them is going to show up unannounced on her son’s doorstep and stay with him for a week, in a final and forceful attempt to figure out why the sons are unhappy, unfulfilled, disappointed, and disappointing. Granted, much of the mothers’ concerns have to do with why their sons haven’t married and produced some grandchildren, but there’s also a deeper concern, about the roles mothers and adult sons are supposed to have in each other’s lives. It’s a fun and thoughtful story along the lines of something from Nick Hornby, and definitely worth a look.
I’ve done some lovely girly reading lately, too. I tore through Maria Beaumont’s 37, which is a typical story of a depressed, middle-class, stay-at-home-mom who finally figures out why she’s so unhappy and finally gets her shit together and realizes what it is she needs to do to be happier. It’s good in the way those books are good.
I also tore through The Joys of Love, which is the “new” Madeleine L’Engle novel. She wrote it in the 40s and never published it, and it is sweet and comfortable and filled with shades of characters and stories that show up in her later writing. It’s a YA novel, and I’d love to know if any twelve-year-old girls will actually read it, and what they will think if they do.
I stopped in the middle of The Joys of Love to watch Secretary, which I wanted to watch while The Boy wasn’t home. It’s a great movie, a very dark yet hopeful story very well told. What does it say about me, though, that I put down the L’Engle to watch James Spader administer spanking to Maggie Gyllenhaal, and then picked up the MLE to finish before bed? Psychotic? Manic? Or just nicely complex? I probably don’t want to know.
I also watched most of the hot, hot Steve McQueen in Papillon this weekend. (I say most of it, because the library’s copy of the DVD was too scratched up for it to play the last twenty minutes.) This is a weird movie, because Super Ultra Mega American Man Steve McQueen plays Papillon, who is a French mobster guy of sorts. (It’s based on what is claimed to be a true story.) Anyway, Steve McQueen is Papillon, which means butterfly. Steve McQueen. Butterfly. It just doesn’t compute. He’s French, but he doesn’t speak with an accent. Neither does Dustin Hoffman, who I think is supposed to be French as well. And they’re sent to a prison camp in South America, where no one has any sort of accent. It’s all very disconcerting, and if it weren't for the fact that Steve McQueen's Papillon looked like this, I don't know if I'd have watched.
Anyway, since I watched it Sunday night, I’ve been singing the Counting Crows song Mr. Jones in my head, substituting Papillon for Mr. Jones. “Pap-ee-own, and me/ tell each other fairy tales . . .”
And you thought I couldn’t get any weirder.
2 comments:
you know, I ALWAYS had confidence you could be weirder. And still do.
The early novels of Madeleine L'Engle are vastly underrated/undertouted. I didn't realize there was a "new" one out. Will search for it.
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