It's Book Review Roundup Time!

In this book review round-up: Moss Hart, more Betty MacDonald and her sister Mary, the Black Death, Penny Marshall, Dodie Smith, and perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read . . . and its sequel.


Act One
by Moss Hart

Moss Hart's Act One is, to put it simply, the most riveting work I've read about working in the American theater.

The work is not a comprehensive biography of the noted playwright and director. There's no mention (save in passing) of mega-successes like The Man Who Came to Dinner or Lady in the Dark, no My Fair Lady, no Camelot. There's remarkably little celebrity gossip. There's no Kitty Carlisle. (Darn it.)
Act One instead is a vivid, detailed, and slightly fictionalized look at Hart's early life, from his poverty-weighted youth in the Bronx until the day after opening night of his first hit collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Once in a Lifetime. Readers anxious to skip to the usual stuff of celebrity autobiographies aren't going to find much here, but anyone interested in the creative process itself will find much to contemplate. Hart is well aware that his work is the sum total of his experiences, from his early theater-going visits with a much-beloved aunt, to the clowning he did as social director of Borscht Belt summer camps in the Catskills. His discussion of his at-first uneasy collaboration with Kaufman is fascinating, as he's painfully aware of how different in approach and execution their writing skills could be.

Yet it's the attention to craftsmanship that makes this autobiography compelling. Its final third is an in-depth exploration of the revision process that transformed Once in a Lifetime from a dud doomed to close out-of-town, to the hit Broadway smash that liberated both Hart and his family from poverty. The process didn't happen overnight; it didn't come with a single burst of inspiration. It happened only with Hart's back-breaking effort and a genuine love for his craft.

It's that love—both for writing, and for the theater—that shines warmly from every page. What a fine read.

Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart
by Steven Bach

Steven Bach's obviously approached his biography of playwright and director Moss Hart with both respect for the man's accomplishments and love for his work. It shows in the enthusiasm with which he's researched his subject, and in his eagerness to outline Hart's lesser-known works to a new audience—he even shares the best lines with obvious relish.

If there's anything lacking in this otherwise-thorough biography, it would have to do with Hart's enduring stage legacy—after the playwright drops dead on his front lawn at the age of 57, the book's done. I might have appreciated an afterword chapter examining revivals of Hart's plays, or an examination of the ways in which the accepted narratives of Hart's life, his marriage to Kitty Carlisle (who refused to cooperate with Bach, he complains several times), and his sexuality have changed in the years since his passing.

There are points in the biography in which Bach seems to assume a casual reader might know more about the gossip and scandal of Hart's life than Bach's willing to explore himself. There's a passing mention of death threats made by Hart's aunt (immortalized and fictionalized in Hart's autobiography, Act One), but no real explanation or documentation of what's obviously a juicy story. I shouldn't have to dig out a past issue of The New Yorker in order to research what a biographer has decided is common knowledge. Bach has a tendency, too, to offer portent without much follow-through, foreshadowing later events in Hart's life without offering details or pulling together loose threads across (admittedly, a very active) timeline.

Still, those are minor flaws. Dazzler is a fascinating look at a man whose talent and seeming sheer force of will provided Broadway with many of its enduring classics, and is a good companion volume to the glossier, if more zestfully-written, Act One.


The Egg and I
by Betty MacDonald

I'm always a little mystified when people refer to the 'happy ending' of Betty MacDonald's 1945 runway bestselling memoir, and express their bafflement that she's divorced by the time of her follow-up volumes, The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything. The book ends with MacDonald contemplating an imminent miserable winter with a distant husband she's just declared 'poles apart,' emotionally.

That's happy?

Perhaps much of the explanation lies with the era's higher tolerance for a husband's lack of empathy—at least, that's the only real justification for which I can attribute anyone's inability to see how miserable MacDonald is throughout her volume. She writes of her naive belief that a wife should support her husband's whims, and as a consequence ends up on a chicken farm with no running water or electricity, in the middle of the mountains of Washington state. She has no books, no friends. Her husband treats his dogs and livestock better than he does his wife; the height of his romanticism in the book is when he grudgingly cracks a crab for her at a picnic. (On their remote farm he even lifts mattresses to inspect if she's dusted the bedsprings, for Pete's sake.)

I suspect most of the blame for the misapprehension that this is a happy book lies with MacDonald herself . . . just because she's so damned funny. She recalls her deprivations with an admirable lack of self-pity and without really calling attention to how miserable she really must have been. Her comic sensibility blossoms in this, her very first work, as she contrasts her utter unpreparedness for the life of a egg farm workhorse with the absurdities she finds in rural living. It's a clever bit of misdirection to lead her readers into thinking her exile was a laugh a minute, but The Egg and I is definitely constructed upon a bedrock of isolation and regret.

I'm making it sound like a Chekovian nightmare—it's not. It's sharp, and funny, and amazingly unsentimental.

The book is always associated with the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, whose appearance in the 1947 movie based on the book led to an eight-movie spinoff. It's surprising how very little space those characters occupy in the memoir, though—they appear on perhaps a dozen or so pages. MacDonald has such a natural and vivid way of bringing folk to life that it's unsurprising they're so unforgettable.

Forty Odd
by Mary Bard

Betty MacDonald's memoir, Anybody Can Do Anything, was essentially a valentine to the get-up-and-go gumption of MacDonald's older sister, Mary Bard, during the height of the Great Depression. MacDonald's portrait of Mary was of a devil-may-care, fearless crusader whose many natural talents led them both into outrageously funny situations. This little volume, penned by Mary Bard herself, is set twenty years after the events of MacDonald's memoir—and it might as well be titled Mary Bard Can't Do Anything Anymore.

Forty Odd takes as its premise that Bard, upon hitting a milestone birthday, suddenly decides that she's forty, fat, foolish, and frustrated. With menopause just around the corner, she decides to take matters in her own hands and avoid sliding into complacency. The book's a little bit of an odd combination of self-help manual, humorous memoir, and the just-between-us-girls practical household tips one might find in a dated issue of Home and Gardens. I'm willing to bet that modern readers will find its narrative style—which has Bard over and over again consulting male authority figures for their sage advice on a woman's purpose in life—a little bit too patronizing and patriarchal.

But the book's not really as dated as some would probably dismiss it. Bard's fashion makeover involves frank assessment of her own style in front of mirrors that are reminiscent of today's What Not to Wear and advice that could be coming straight from the mouth of Tim Gunn; her experiences with a book club aren't that far removed from the book clubs of today. And although Bard's fairly mopey about her impending Change of Life, she's at least in on the joke—she knows exactly how tiresome she's being, and takes steps to improve by the book's end.

Although none of her memoirs are as deft, as touching, or as funny as Betty MacDonald's, Bard's Forty Odd comes to life at unexpected moments. When she's placed in absurd situations, or well out of her depth, the chapters can be pretty humorous—and when she writes about situations in which she's taking care of others, as in the episodes involving her burgeoning Brownie troop, we get flashes of the old Mary Bard of whom MacDonald wrote so affectionately.

Onions in the Stew
by Betty MacDonald

Onions in the Stew stands out as Betty MacDonald's most mature and effortlessly humorous memoir. It's also seemingly the most unstructured of the four published in her lifetime. Whereas her previous volumes tackled the specific themes of egg farming, sanatorium life, and job hunting during the Great Depression, Onions is a simply a reflection upon life on Seattle's Vashon Island.

Of course, the simplicity is deceptive. Behind the stories of tides and gardens and page after page of rumination on local seafood is a truly remarkable narrative about the difficulties of blended families and of a mother's attempts during the nineteen-forties to raise a pair of adolescent girls. MacDonald is unafraid to be melancholy, though she's never maudlin; she portrays her daughters realistically and to the point of unattractiveness, though her love and affection for them is always clear.

Unsentimental and laugh-out-loud funny, Onions in the Stew is a classic slice of American domestic humor from an era that has vanished entirely, yet has never quite gone out of style.

Remains To Be Scene
by R.T. Jordan

One of my enduring pet peeves with the subgenre of the 'cute' murder mystery is how callously its usually-adorable and winsome leads behave while solving a comical and quaint little murder or two—when in reality, the stench of crime is pretty dreadful, and can never be obscured by buckets of syrupy banter and sugary character quirks. Remains To Be Scene neatly manages to bypass that typical shortcoming, however, by making its lead detectives as thoroughly unpleasant as its murder victims, thus neatly removing any obligation the reader has either to root for the former, or feel sorry for the latter.

The gimmick here is that Polly Pepper is a former has-been television star—something along the lines of Carol Burnett, but with less talent—whose career has come to a near-standstill. For some reason the novel really makes clear, when two rivals are killed on the set of a movie and Polly Pepper is asked to step into their acting roles, she appoints herself the lead investigator of the case and uses her powers of deduction to track down the ruthless killer. And damned if the entire LAPD doesn't just roll over and let Polly Pepper do it, too.

Unfortunately for Polly Pepper (the author's unspoken rule in the novel that one is only allowed to refer to his heroine by both names, as when her romantic interest gushes in the book's most romantic and lyrical line, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!"), Polly Pepper’s powers mostly consist of slugging back cocktails and slinging abrasive and unsubtle questions in every direction.

Joining Polly Pepper as her nutty sidekicks are her son Tim, a wastrel slugabout whose function in the book is to be as stereotypically gay as possible on a wearying basis and to make icky-poo faces at any mention of his mother's lady-parts, and her maid, Placenta. No, that's the entire joke, there. Polly Pepper's maid's name is Placenta. Please, do attempt to keep your sides from splitting. Her job is primarily to keep Polly Pepper pickled with a peck of planter's punches.

I kept kind of hoping that the book might self-knowingly mock itself by following the Rosemary and Thyme model of amateur detection, in which the protagonists are so stupid and blundering and seemingly unable to detect their way out of a wet paper bag, that the murderer finally reveals himself out of exhaustion and tries to kill one or the other or both of the detectives. No such luck in this novel. Polly Pepper pulls a has-been television actress's version of the detective-in-the-parlor reveal that lasts for fully one-fifth of the entire book's total length. It's excruciating. I've never rooted for a third literary murder (Polly Pepper's) so hard in my life. And yet I have to confess that I'm quite curious if the sequels—oh yes, there's an entire Polly Pepper series—are as bad.

Dead curious, one might say.

Final Curtain
by R. T. Jordan

In the second installment of the Polly Pepper amateur detective series, Polly Pepper, the aging has-been star of television's much-beloved The Polly Pepper Playhouse, has been employed to star in a revival of the classic musical Mame. Yet when one of the show's production team ends up dead after being concussed by an Emmy (or, as the author breathlessly and tastefully puts it, "Karen was a goner the instant her brain began to seep through the crack in her head!"), who has to step in to solve the crime but Polly Pepper herself!

Well. maybe the police ought to. Especially since the head detective is Polly Pepper's boyfriend—I think we all remember his vivid testimony of love and dedication from the first book in the series, when he uncontrollably gushed, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!" (Lest we forget, it's the author's unspoken dictum that Polly Pepper be referred to by her entire name, even when she's talking about herself, as when Polly Pepper grills a suspect by growling, "Tell us everything or sweet Polly Pepper will turn into Shirley Temple on a roid rage!")

But no, apparently when Polly Pepper is on the case, the LAPD simply rolls over and plays dead. Because, after all, who better to sniff out a criminal than a third-rate comedienne who has spent most of her life nursing grudges against Nanette Fabray and Pearl Bailey while tossing down Xanax with champagne chasers? Screw you, trained police detectives. Polly Pepper's got it under control! Polly Pepper's idiotic sidekicks, her incredibly gay son Tim and her incredibly badly-named maid Placenta, add to the general inanity of the antics by running around like chickens with their heads cut off, only with less brain activity than beheaded fowls.

I wish my mockery of the book's deplorable writing and its even worse plotting didn't make this novel sound a lot more campy and attractive than it actually is. It's painful to read several hundred pages of Final Curtain when one the entire time is asking the question of oneself, "Couldn't this all have been solved with a single call to the proper authorities?" Polly Pepper's frantic self-absorption and need to be at the center of any drama makes the book a slow and deadly slog that almost made me wish I'd been the one bonked in the head by an Emmy—even of the daytime variety.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
by John Kelly

Once John Kelly gets to the 'intimate' portion of his The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, his overview of the most destructive human plague in history becomes a fascinating collection of vignettes. The book works best when it focuses upon its mission to collect very small and anecdotal stories of human triumph, perseverance, greed, and folly in the face of inconceivable adversity. In these later portions of his well-documented and researched study, the portraits Kelly paints of small-town physicians grappling to find some means to battle the disease, or of ignorant patriarchs or of those who see the demise of their rivals as an opportunity to chase power, are remarkably well-done.

However, it's slow going to get there. Kelly's writing gets off to several false starts when he uses both the introduction and the first chapter to paint a broad contextual canvas of the plague's age and geography, only to conclude with ominous portent that the aim of his book is to examine what happened during the Black Plague. Mr Kelly, I kind of figured out what I was getting into from the title and the book cover, thanks. I don't need two prefaces to warn me that I haven't picked up the latest Tyra Banks novel.

And when Kelly aims to provide those vast, panoramic expansive overviews of the medieval world, its trading practices, and its geography, his prose turns deadly dull. All but the most fact-starved readers will find the first few chapters a treacherous slog that's occasionally peppered with abrupt changes in tone, as when in the middle of a dry discussion of pathogens, he declares that Y. pestis has "biological oomph."

After the false starts and the turgid panoramic prose, however, the book's fairly interesting—and it even has its payoffs when it moves into the more intimate spectrum promised in its title. I also appreciated the afterword chapter about "plague deniers"—scientists who believe in alternate biological explanations of the Black Death.

Whether this is the only volume one will ever need about the calamitous plague that devastated much of the known world is debatable; as an introduction, it's fair.

It Ends With Revelations
by Dodie Smith

The central premise of Dodie Smith's It Ends with Revelations isn't even mentioned until over halfway through the novel: its heroine, Jill, is knowingly married to a gay man. There's no scandal to it—no shocking discovery, nothing that the heroine didn't know before she entered into the arrangement. It's all very genteel, as are most of the relationships in Smith's works—as is the follow-up plot, in which an MP and his family conspire to un-marry Jill from her husband and take her over for the own.
Smith's doing some subtle and sympathetic writing on a delicate topic, here. The latter is perhaps not unexpected; Smith was great friends with Christopher Isherwood during the height of his writing career, after all. She manages to address what was still a shocking subject with great sensitivity and aplomb.

What's disappointing, somewhat, is that the novel's plotting might be too subtle for most readers to appreciate. Most of the fighting Jill's husband does to keep her takes place in the book's earliest pages, long before the average reader would have picked up on the book's central struggle. Also, among all of Smith's heroines, Jill is the most frustratingly passive. Even at the book's climax, she's allowing the men in her life to negotiate with each other for who gets her in his life; she never seems to make an actual choice of her own. She's less a person than a utility to be annexed.

Worse still, the book's shockingly old-fashioned. A casual reader picking up this tale of arranged marriages and homosexual blackmail for the first time might well assume it was written during the mid-century time period of I Capture the Castle. Yet It Ends with Revelations was published almost a solid two decades later, in 1968; to consider that it came out in the year famous for the Summer of Love betrays how very much out of touch Smith's writing was with current events. Mere months later, the Stonewall riots would make this quaint and genteel novel look like an archaeological relic.
Still, for its sweet insight into the workings of the English theater, the book's a pleasant enough read. Dodie Smith's characteristic charm counts for a lot. Fans of I Capture the Castle and The Town in Bloom will enjoy another volume in the author's sweet re-creation of a lost and respectable age.

My Mother Was Nuts
by Penny Marshall

None of the revelations in actor/director Penny Marshall's autobiography are particularly astonishing. There was strife on the set of Laverne & Shirley during the show's run. (We knew.) There was a decades-long rift between Cindy Williams and Marshall as a result. (It figures.) Marshall dropped acid with Carrie Fisher. (Who didn't?)

What is remarkable about My Mother Was Nuts, however, is how uncannily is manages to capture Marshall's voice—that unmistakable Bronx whine. It brays from every page. As I read the pages of the book, I could hear every anecdote told in Marshall's remarkable and characteristic vowels. The experience makes an already-winning read even more so.

Marshall's career reads as haphazard and even accidental. Taken as a whole, though, it's representative of a philosophy repeated several times throughout the memoir: she surrounded herself with the funniest and most talented people she knew, and learned all she could from them. She's humble over her failures and perhaps even morbidly modest about her successes and influences (Steven Spielberg structured the last scene of Schindler's List after her final scene in A League of Their Own, after all).

But more importantly, even in times of adversity—career flux, cancer, armed intruders in her home—Marshall's wry humor is abundant and free-flowing. A swift and engaging read.