The Friday Article Roundup
Painting the town red with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will muse on:
Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Michael A. Gonzales eulogizes movie poster artist extraordinaire Tony Stella at Oldster Magazine:
People like to say “gone before their time,” especially for those who die as young as Stella did—as though there is a death clock beyond the stars and it was running fast on the day the person you loved died. I think instead we should concentrate on the contributions they gifted us before slip sliding away into the next realm….While Tony illustrated art for various genres of film, a few of his drawings of NYC based movies served as a time machine transporting me to those back-in-the-days moments when I went to the theater at least once a week. Many of those cinematic temples are long gone, but they’re still vivid in my memories. When I saw Tony’s stunning Taxi Driver poster I recalled seeing that flick at the massive Olympia with my mom when I was 14.
At his blog Element X, Steve MacFarlane interviews author Guillermo Arriaga about The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and writing in general:
SM: I went back and listened to a talk you did in 2006 where, talking about teaching writing classes, you warned your students not to try being deep or profound.
GA: Because it doesn’t mean you will not be profound, or deep, or that you cannot be. But your job is not to be “deep” on purpose, your job is to tell a story. If you are deep, the story will be deep. If you are shallow, the story is going to be shallow.
Sara Welch-Larson at Bright Wall Dark Room considers the United States through the lens of Michael Mann:
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective….In both stories, Mann finds the kernel of defiance and control, then explores the tension between the two. His films have a reputation for their technical expertise both in front of and behind the camera, but I would argue that the technical expertise really sings because of the defiance of the characters who wield it. His protagonists don’t engage in opposition simply because they’re contrary; they’re contrary because they’ve earned the right through their skill, and that idiosyncrasy sets them apart from the rest of society. They stand at odds against the power structures that would try to control them, lone men against a tide that will someday engulf them.
Robert Rubsam sings of arms and the man using them to beat the shit out of dudes in The Furious at Defector:
The Furious is a story of doing, not saying, and [director Kenji] Tanigaki and action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura have painted a portrait of the human body in all its absurd potential. They prefer close-up, hand-to-hand-to-foot-to-knife-to-hammer battles, generating maximum pressure by trapping combatants in tight spaces, and forcing them to make contact. In one standout early sequence, Wang is ambushed by an army of low-level thugs, and seemingly trapped inside of a cramped UFC ring. Two problems, one solution: With every man he beats bloody, Wang can climb higher, until he leaps off his makeshift body-pyramid and out of the cage.
And for The Bangor Daily News, Bridget Huber profiles librarians who are teaching patrons to turn off AI:
“I seem to have become the face of AI haters — which I’m fine with — in the library world,” [Bangor librarian Hannah] Cyrus said….Cyrus sees helping people improve their information literacy as a central part of her role. “If I can’t tell people that generative AI is not a source of information that they should be relying on, then what can I tell them?” she said. “That’s my job. I’m an information professional.”
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What did we watch?
Dial M for Murder – To my surprise, I watched this last just five years ago, and my Letterboxd review was pretty much how I felt now. (“Dial M for mediocre.”) There is clearly a certain sort of movie that for one reason or another leaves pleasant memories of some kind, so you watch it again and then all the stuff I don’t like anymore comes rushing back. Anyway, stagey and talky and dull though Ray Milland and John Williams are pretty good. Why did anyone think this was good for 3D?
Yeah, same – not a CinemaSins type but the credulity of nobody truly suspecting Milland until deep into the movie was a bridge too far.
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Three, “The Paragon Of Animals”
A mixed bag. I tend to like watching the process of the characters attempting to enact their new institutions and ideals, even stuff like G’Kar gleefully writing and rewriting his various documents. Even Garibaldi’s cynicism is interesting in this context. Conversely, the telepath stuff is only sporadically interesting; the cult leader guy played by the dude who would go onto playing the Medic from Team Fortress 2 is aggressively boring; rescuing the telepath guy and trying to get his info out is much more interesting.
What’s interesting is that, because I find the show a mixed bag overall – full thoughts when I finish, but I think this is the rare serialised show that’s a solid 3/5, about the level of a single Law & Order episode, and it’s mainly because there’s interesting ideas and a sloppy execution. Anyway, I find the show such a mixed bag overall that I’m not noticing a huge dip in quality that the show famously reaches at this point.=
I got a big laugh out of this:
“Offer them my body. I’ll be dead by the end of this anyway.”
“I second the motion.”
You may remember my extremely con feelings on Marcus; I was weeping and begging for his return upon the entrance of telepath cult guy, who is clearly intended as a replacement in the “charismatic outsider” department and instead is awful. This is not helped by the larger X-Men problem of the telepaths, where the show’s empathetic argument for tolerance is undermined by these people being an actual damn menace to the order of things — Octavia Butler and Grant Morrison actually sat down and thought this out (and wrote good characters), Strazcynski less so.
I’d heard that floppy-haired cult guy (who also played Travis Touchdown in my beloved No More Heroes) was terrible, but he actively sucks the energy out of the room. It’s a shame because there’s something to the basic concept here, but Straczynski falls into the exact same problem almost everyone ever does, as you say – queerness and POCness isn’t inherently dangerous in the way superpowers are. Just write a damn black guy!
Hire Paul Kinsey for the writer’s room!
World Cup, France vs Morocco – I was hoping for an upset here, I haven’t actually watched a full Morocco match this world cup but they seemed to have impressed a lot of people. They didn’t really show up against France though, and the favourites didn’t have to work that hard to break them down, which was frustrating. So I ended up turning it off when a couple of goals meant the game was basically won to watch
Seinfeld, S8, “The Van Buren Boys” – one of the wackier episodes where everything felt well balanced and consistently funny. I particularly enjoyed Peterman buying all of Kramer’s stories to bulk out his “biography”, only for Kramer to find he was powerless without them. There was a nice note of absurdity to Jerry’s dating dilemma in this one too – everyone bizarrely things that his date (Christine Taylor) is “a loser” and it’s mostly funny because of how little sense it makes. Meanwhile, George picks the most George-esque candidate for a scholarship and ends up getting hassled by the titular street gang. A really fun one.
I particularly love that Peterman is apparently the most boring, normal guy in the world outside of work.
Jerry’s inexplicable loser girlfriend is a great example of the show dipping into magic realism, which I always get a kick out of. It’s up there with the woman who always seemed to be wearing the same dress. Seinfeld is basically about people doing things that are technically not illegal, but still feels weirdly wrong – everyone feeling sorry for the woman isn’t technically wrong, but it makes no sense.
Haha yes, he’s deeply boring outside of work, refuses to dip into his own stories of adventure yet is quick to acknowledge that the book needs a spark and borrow from Kramer. It makes very little sense but somehow in a way that fits his character perfectly.
John O’Hurley bringing his usual intensity to drinking and watching TV in sweatpants does a lot of the legwork in making it make sense, I think.
It also feels very true to a larger rich guy fraudulence that I think manifests more frequently today — maybe not by buying a weirdo’s stories but in their general attention-seeking behavior without actual skill or charisma or risk.
Noah Kahancert
This was on Wednesday; I’m playing catch-up since I got home later on Thursday. Good music (obviously if you’re going to a Noah Kahancert, even mostly as your wife’s plus-one, you like Noah Kahan) and some definite energy and care put into crafting a performance, from elaborate (sometimes too elaborate–I’ll take that obnoxious house, but get that police car out of here) set design to location-specific banter to LED bracelets in the crowd forming a light show that I found so weirdly hypnotic that I kept having to remind myself to look at the stage and not just the rhythmically flashing colors. But I think I’m just not temperamentally suited for really huge, Fenway-filling concerts like this. Giant crowds tend to jangle my nerves and leave me overwhelmed in a bad way, and while it’s nice to hear everyone singing in unison and being all excited, sometimes I wanted to hear the actual performer, which was often more difficult than I would like. All those Mountain Goats concerts in smaller halls are way more my speed. I have the soul of an old dog that needs a thunder shirt and a comfortable blanket to lie down on.
Demonwarp
Will I write this up? Can I write this up? Can language truly describe it? You come for George Kennedy fighting Bigfoot (who is actually an alien), and then you spend about an hour in a cheap slasher movie with Bigfoot as the killer (complete with gratuitous nudity), and then it turns out Bigfoot’s making zombies, and then things reach truly epic levels of weirdness. The sets of the third act are not at all what you would expect from the sets of the first act. I don’t want to spoil this, because even though it is not good at all, someone else here needs to see it to share the experience with me. It’s on Tubi. I mean, you knew it was.
Not enough George Kennedy. Decent Bigfoot mask. And just … did they have two completely separate screenplays that they decided to artificially graft together, or did someone’s mind really work like this? I have to know.
Romcom where the screenwriter of Demon and the screenwriter of Warp collide in the hallway, mixing up their screenplays right before a big meeting with the producer, resulting in the two of them forced to collaborate on making the Frankensteined movie created by the mix-up. Can they finish the film on time and under budget? Will the raw sexual magnetism of George Kennedy disrupt their burgeoning relationship? Give me the god damn money, Hollywood.
I haven’t been to a big concert in forever, with the exception of No Kings stuff (which is not really the same thing) the last one was Springsteen down the road from Fenway in Mansfield in what, 2007? I’ve been thinking about finding another to go to because it is a different vibe from my regular shows but in general I want the smaller halls. Never been to Fenway, I’ve heard that it is great if you’re actually on the field but in the seats you’re stuck with a PA system designed for baseball instead of live music and also you’re sitting in Fenway’s seats.
Yeah same with me and Springsteen at Gillette.
Veronica Mars — the antepenultimate episode of Season One involves revenge porn, if an earlier cell phone-focused episode is not just ridiculous but incomprehensible this has not aged a day. And particularly interesting is Veronica’s plan of fighting fire with fire by getting similar dirt on the aggressor, this is very Hush-Hush of her. The penultimate episode remains a bit off — there are three big ongoing mysteries in the season, Who Killed Lily, Where’s Veronica’s Mom and Who Raped Veronica, and that latter is absent for most of the season before it is resolved here. Structurally this means the show can spend a whole season creating one-off high school characters in various episodic mysteries and then having them around and characterized for Veronica to question here, a clever move, but the longer this goes on the weirder it gets that Veronica didn’t do this 18 months ago, because much of the information she gets is extremely public and about her roofied and blacked-out behavior — you never wanted to resolve this before? The resolution ends up dovetailing with the incest tease and then that is also resolved in everyone’s favor, this feels a bit like the show getting cold feet. And while I would never victim-blame Amanda Seyfried, the resolution to that first mystery is very well done but it is set in motion by a huge dick move on her part, isn’t it? Picking that person in particular to get back at your ex.
Yeah, I remember feeling like S1 never really grappled with what a dick move that was (especially since I feel like it would be hard for Lily to have dated Logan for such a long time without ever realizing how that person treated him, to make things even worse).
100% agreed about how the timing doesn’t work for “actually, it turns out Veronica just needed to ask people about the party in detail” to be how the rape plot gets resolved: it doesn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have done the earlier.
Bell and Dohring really had such spectacular chemistry, though, damn.
Oh wow, I hadn’t even thought about the abuse angle! That makes it so much worse! I wonder how much of this comes with flexibility and change — after learning the story was originally a novel I can see how certain things that likely would’ve gotten more attention on the page (all the mom stuff) fell away for the needs of procedural TV. And both Logan and Lily were not intended to be major characters, apparently Thomas saw Seyfried’s audition and wrote a ton more material for her, this is obviously the correct decision but it winds up creating a more sympathetic character along the way whose behavior doesn’t align with actions necessary for the story’s end. And Logan of course goes down a similar path but he has more time to do so and it generally goes smoother — the exception is this endgame, which pulls the “Logan may be EVIL!” card twice, once at the party and then with the reveal of a certain bedroom, and the second in particular is annoying. We’ve seen this guy! He’s not doing this!
Oh, I was willing to believe it of S1 Logan.
You identify some of the show’s faults, but I was gobsmacked by the revenge pork episode, where Veronica had a very reasonable solution and then it didn’t work. That was not at all what I was expecting from my teen mystery of the week show! (And it draws the connection with the inspiration for her character, Philip Marlowe, even more tightly.)
Eta: I am leaving the typo.
Hahahaha, “revenge pork” feels like it’s getting into a Titus Andronicus situation.
Logan at the very beginning of the show (mainly the filmed-separately pilot) is a huge piece of shit but the show develops him and Dohring is so damn good at the wounded bad boy bit that giving him a SPOILER is totally implausible — not to mention giving any 17-year-old a SPOILER reads as implausible. Perhaps an adult who is more capable of adding all this shit to a room is a likelier culprit? Veronica often relies on her first instincts and this bites her in the ass a fair amount of the time so it’s not out of character for her to assume the worst, but maybe think this through. The party situation is different, it’s technically Old Asshole Logan time-wise and it is also very much in line with the attitudes the show is grimly good at depicting regarding dude behavior, i.e. the revenge pork episode.
Project Hail Mary – Goddamn, if you cut almost all of the flashbacks, you have a pretty strong, fun two-hander about Gosling bonding with this really expressive, cool rock alien character. The pacing is just shot otherwise at 2 hours and 40 minutes(!) much as I enjoy Sandra Huller. Many quibbles with the tone and pop culture references too – which are mostly during the flashbacks – yet visually the movie is amazing, feeling very textured and beautifully shot in it’s emphasis on color. Was struck by how Rocky’s race sees via sound so their entire ship is designed as if to enhance vibration and sound waves.
Tales From The Crypt, “The Trap” – Look, the “they don’t make ’em like they used to” era also had ridiculous plot holes/script issues! Still fun with Bruce McGill chomping up scenery as a piece of shit trying to fake his death for the life insurance and using his abused wife (Teri Garr) and coroner brother (Bruno Kirby) to do so. Michael J. Fox directs and does a good job while making a cameo. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of a man being sent to the electric chair for burglary.
Man, McGill/Garr/Kirby is such a great combo of performers and faces, and for a one-shot anthology segment! I’m not sure who the 20s equivalent of that crew is but I don’t think they’re getting together for something like this.
Makes up for some weird storytelling! Maybe Stephen Root and I dunno who else.
The pop culture references that took me out of Hail Mary the most were in space (Planet Adrian and Grace making a joke about Superman II). I think I am really over that kind of shorthard characterization.
Everyone Says I Love You — Allen over the last 20+ years had the occasionally — only occasionally — justified reputation of just cranking them out whether he had an idea or not. My recollection is this movie was the first time that sentiment was common in the critical community. And they’re dead wrong. This doesn’t have the thematic depth of Annie Hall or Husbands and Wives, but it is an absolute delight.
Allen is the third wheel in a blended family consisting of his ex-wife Goldie Hawn, her husband/his friend Alan Alda, and their kids Drew Barrymore, Natasha Lyonne, Lukas Haas, Gabby Hoffman, and Natalie Portman. And with a cast like that (also including Edward Norton as Barrymore’s fiancé) often bouncing off each other in the same room you get some fantastic background takes if you’re paying attention. Oh yeah, also they sing.
Because this is Allen’s paean to the Old Hollywood musicals of his youth. There are big production numbers (frequently shot in only one or two takes, with dancers and singers flying in from off stage) as well as small, solo performances such as a reprised “I’m Through With Love” that visits Portman, Alda, Allen and others over the course of the third act. (Most of the actors do their own singing and dancing, and most of them are not professional singers and dancers, which actually lends an air of authenticity and naturalism to what is, obviously, staged and artificial. Allen’s song in particular is great acting moment from him. (The 15-year-old Portman’s too, as she sings through her sobs.)
As far as plot, this is a celebration of romance, even the rough parts. Barrymore (styled, along with Norton and unlike the rest of the cast, from a Hollywood musical) has cold feet about her relationship with the sweet but awkward Norton, complicated by a hilarious turn by Tim Roth as a slimy but magnetic ex-con, one of the liberal Hawn’s projects. Then in an extended sequence in Venice Allen woos a vacationing Julia Roberts with the help of daughter Lyonne, who has spied on Roberts’ in therapy back in New York and so knows all her secret desires and longings.
The best thing about a retrospective like this — in particular for an artist with this lengthy a résumé, is seeing how the auteur rechannels and repurposes ideas over time. Themes and even plots, sure, but also devices like the overseas therapy sessions, here played mostly for laughs rather than the crushing existential dread it unleashed on Gena Rowlands in Another Woman.
Another thing I noticed consciously for the first time is how Allen is a master at opening a film — of course there is the well known opening sequence of Manhattan (and the similar but less known helicopter shot beginning Manhattan Murder Mystery). But here it starts right up with the first musical number between Norton and Barrymore before you know anything about who these characters are — and you don’t need to! Norton’s earnest emotion cements him as the character you’re rooting for. (And the same thing with the Greek Chorus opening the story in Mighty Aphrodite.) I wonder if his standard credits sequence, so simple and familiar to anyone who has seen even a few of his pictures, lulls you into a sense of comfort that makes a big, powerful opening scene hit all the harder.
But those musings aside, I really enjoyed this one. It’s unfairly forgotten, especially in light of Deconstructing Harry coming up next. But that’s too bad; it’s a real winner.
What did we read?
Making my way through the bio of Trotsky, and not much else now. Definitely interesting but, as Yoda would say, not a page turner.
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, Richard Reeves
What an asshole. I hate that while I can’t refer to Ronald Reagan as smart, I also can’t refer to him as dumb – he has no head for details (worsened by his ever-worsening dementia), but he has an insane clarity of vision and goal, one that leads him to lie to a level Nixon could have only dreamed of. In fairness to Reagan, one of his biggest successes – shifting the American’s perception of themselves – cannot be conveyed in the format of the book, although all his failures can; most miserably, his complete inability to actually balance the budget.
(It’s especially weird that his second-biggest success is his creating a relationship with the Soviet Union, and even then, that’s because he happens to be running the US at the same time that Gorbechav takes over, who happens to be interested in reshaping the SU himself.)
His absolute commitment to rewriting reality would be admirable if it weren’t horrible; Reeves tracks every lie and half-lie as he goes, although many of them are left to implication as well – having already told us something Reagan will go on to lie about. I think it’s wrong to describe him as completely empty, but he definitely didn’t allow many facts to actually enter his head. Often I was awestruck by the hypocrisy of his accusations; sometimes because of what I knew, sometimes just because of the brazen openness.
There was some biographer who got an advance for a Reagan bio and returned the money because he simply could not crack the man’s psychology. Seeing him as a perpetual liar/delusional is probably the best attitude.
And another biographer who invented a narrator to be Reagan’s best friend because it was the only way he felt he could tell the story. Really.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – further adventures through the Guardian’s 100 Best Novels list, as I find them in second-hand bookshops. I really enjoyed this one to begin with, it’s playful, witty and odd even as it hints towards tragedy from an early stage. I’m not sure all of the time-jumps and wordplay really work in its favour though, I started to find it a little hard work after a certain point, stylistic choices getting in the way of the story. That said, I still enjoyed it quite a bit and am glad to have read it, even if it didn’t quite pass my “SHOULD this be on a list of the greatest novels ever?” vibe check. But also this is one of the more modern novels on the list (1997) and also I like that the list has some more diverse voices on it rather than just packing in more Dickens etc.
A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons – So far a good crime thriller with a horror twist, will have more to report next week.
Almost done with Laird Barron’s newest short story collection, Not A Speck of Light, and I might have to drop him as a favorite writer – what once struck me as cool now reads as overwritten, and Barron keeps repeating himself. Whiskey! Dogs! Smartass moll heroines! Oblique cosmic horror! Evil rich esotericists! There are some decent stories here, still not enough of them.
Christ Stopped At Eboli by Carlo Levi – Need to get back to this, the memoir of an anti-fascist doctor and painter in exile in a Southern Italian peasant village during the Mussolini era. Levi can be condescending but he’s mostly genuinely interested in the people around him, who come across as default anarchists; the state and the church are non-entities in their day to day lives and they inherently have to help each other because everyone except the gentry are stuck in the same grinds of poverty and toil.
Dirty Money, by Richard Stark
And so it ends. While you can tell this wasn’t intended as the definitive button on Parker’s career–it’s a wrap-up book, tying off all the loose ends from the preceding two novels and doing so in a satisfactory fashion (a lot of the characters I originally found too slight in Nobody Runs Forever feel more vivid and deftly conveyed here, especially Sandra)–its last line is Good, Good Shit in that regard, as perfect for the last line of a Parker series as “Wants me to tell him something pretty” was for the last line of Deadwood. (For that matter, the last Dortmunder book also works fairly well as an accidental capstone.)
Parker goes back for the money he and his compatriots hid back in Nobody Runs Forever, and, to Dave’s point about the grim background impetus of an increasingly cash-free society, it’s because there’s a way to unload all these bills, recorded serial numbers or not, out of the country for ten cents on the dollar. And with Parker’s good cover identity burned, he needs a new one, and it’s only gotten pricier and more complicated since the last time he bought a clean name. It’s another way this accidentally works as a good final look at him: way back in The Hunter, he could basically do all this himself with a minimum of effort, and now he needs experts who also have overseas contacts.
There’s some good Claire involvement in this book, as she serves as part of Parker’s cover identity, making them semi-believable as a pair of leaf-peepers at a cutesy B&B–well, making him semi-believable as a husband reluctantly humoring his wife in said cause, more accurately–which he could never have pulled off on his own; in a nice detail, the innkeeper has the chance to officially connect Parker with the police sketches and chooses not to in part because she doesn’t want to believe that nice “Mrs. Willis” is mixed up in such a thing and doesn’t want to make trouble for her. And Sandra gets a lot to do in this book, building off her general competence in Nobody Runs Forever and going to more specific places with it: the scene where she really sells them removing the hymnals (and almost all of the money) from the abandoned church is one of my favorite parts of the book.
Scattered thoughts: Tom Lindahl hasn’t been picked up as of this book. Good for him. Parker comes to an arrangement with Cosmopolitan Beverages, which I really like: it feels like a natural extension of the tense rapprochement he eventually reached with the Outfit way back when. (And that fake picnic lunch scene is great.) Not only has cash gotten scarcer, security tighter, and police more militarized, Parker has also gotten more reachable: it’s been quite a few books since he’s had Handy to take his calls for him (let alone the late Joe Shear). A lot of people have his number, and the police have stopped by the house to talk to Claire. If Parker’s survived so long mostly by being the consummate professional, this bit of humanity–the attachment to Claire that lets him make allowances for her attachment to her house, even though she says here that she’s willing to give it up–may be what ultimately brings him down. But he’s got tonight.
I’m sorry this journey is over, but I look forward to all the rereading I’ll be able to do with these in the future. I’ll do the Grofields eventually too.
Taken as a whole, I think the underlying story of Parker is that while he is very much his own man, even sociopathic criminals cannot go it alone. Oh, he doesn’t really have friends and whatever he has with Claire, it’s not really love. But he has so much more going on in his life at the end than he did at the beginning. Though I think you could argue that if he hadn’t taken that one misbegotten job in The Hunter, if his wife hadn’t needed to betray him, if he never needed to chase after the Outfit to get his money back, maybe he would have ended up where he did a lot sooner. But that doesn’t make for good stories.
Though I can’t say that Westlake actually intended for Parker to grow. These are not that kind of story. We’re here for the heists, for the troubles, for seeing how Parker gets away with it. That maybe he changes despite himself is almost an accident. And worth adding that outside of the addition of May, Dortmunder changes even less. He starts with a crew that is just reliable enough and heists that just barely pay the rent, and that’s where he ends up. Change is for other people.
This is a great insight on the relative change and lack thereof with Parker and Dortmunder. Change comes to the latter in terms of others (like adding Judson to the crew, or even Tiny when you go back far enough) but he’s himself the whole way. And looking at Parker in the context of that betrayal in The Hunter is really interesting — he and Lynn had a pretty good relationship before, uh, the murder attempt, and it’s stated that he was very comfortable in this monogamous situation. Westlake was a big Hammett fan and what is coming to mind now is the Flitcraft parable in The Maltese Falcon — “he adjusted himself to beams falling, and when beams stopped falling, he adjusted himself to that.” Parker taking the long way around to the start with the same lack of awareness as Flitcraft, but if you pointed that out to him he wouldn’t care and in that sense his existentialism is more complete than anyone attempting to use that tale as a lesson.
That really is interesting about Parker’s life vs. Dortmunder’s. Maybe Parker’s life fills up a bit because as much he’s always been somewhat out of time, he also–by virtue of being competent and successful and someone to take seriously–has to at least be somewhat adapted to his time as well; he has to gain what’s necessary for stability in a changing world, so he has to adjust, somewhat, to continue being what he always has been. Though, yeah, it’s really interesting to think about how he might have ended up without the events of The Hunter.
START THE REREAD! And great thoughts on Claire — she is able to help him out with her particular set of skills (it’s been a very nice touch throughout her appearances in the series that her elegance and charisma is a softer but stronger version of Parker’s extremely astute but rough-edged people management) while still being a potential liability. The Westlake Review speculates that Stark had one more Parker in him where this would be put to the test, which I think is plausible. But I really like the detail, which I missed on the first go-round, that Parker has picked a new identity and so has Claire, and they share them with each other but not the reader. That feels very intentional on Stark’s part and it points to an exit that works — Michael Mann has always been seemingly right but actually wrong for any Parker work (he’s a romantic, Stark is pragmatic) but this points to the end of Blackhat of all things.
And Sandra is a lot of fun here, the kind of character that would make a great lead in other hands (I don’t think Westlake had the capacity to write a strong female main character, let alone a lesbian, but he’s always been stellar at secondary characters) and if her path is not quite one Parker can follow it’s an intriguing alternative of being outside society in a lot of ways. Parker’s deal with Cosmopolitan is made on his terms but it’s still an actual deal rather then an agreement/detente like his first go-round with the Outfit, and that is a pretty big concession to the rest of the world.
Oh, that’s a lovely point about Parker and Claire’s new identities.
Yeah, Parker’s deal with Cosmopolitan involves a lot more paperwork and a lot more mutual risk than his detente with the Outfit ever did; it’s an arrangement from Cosmopolitan’s world that embraces him, not him as the immovable force remaking the previously immovable object.
It’s been great hearing from you and Simon about all of these as I’ve gone through!
I half heartedly recommend the Grofield books next. The first three are basically in the flavor of 60s spy novels (as Westlake really wanted to write James Bond), the last is very much a Stark novel.
Talking Stark is always fun! I’ve read these so much, it’s very cool to see the perspective of someone with fresh eyes. And seconding Simon, the Grofields are worth reading but only the last one really pops.