In Review: March 24, 1999
Stormy island
A birthday party turns tempestuous
The Storm
Frederick Buechner '47
HarperCollins, $18
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on," declares Prospero
in The Tempest, and Kenzie Maxwell, the protagonist of Frederick
Buechner's 30th book, The Storm, would agree with this sentiment.
In this slim, graceful novel are all the elements of a Shakespearean romance:
people's lives divide and intersect, the possibility of love dangles like
ripe tropical fruit, and long-lost relatives are reconciled. Only instead
of occurring on some enchanted atoll, this plot takes root in Florida on
Plantation Island, a modern-day retreat for the privileged, run by Violet
Sickert, a rich widow with a whim of steel.
The cast of characters stars Kenzie, once a young writer of promise,
now an aging, regretful man, married for the third time but haunted by the
memory of his one true love, a graffiti artist named Kia who died in giving
birth to their out-of-wedlock daughter, Bree. His current wife, Willow,
also has a child, Averill, from an earlier union, now a 40-year-old; he
is disaffected, vegetarian, meditative -- a '60s type transplanted to the
1990s on this genteel time-warp of an island. Estranged from Kenzie is Kenzie's
older brother, Dalton, a retired Columbia law professor who has a distant
stepson, Nandy (like Shakespeare, Buechner has a taste for family foils
and parallels).
Buechner, whose previous novels include Godric and On the Road
with the Archangel, has fun here with the Shakespearean template of
The Tempest. The plot mostly concerns the nature of reconciliation.
The focus is Kenzie's 70th-birthday party, complicated by the petty intrigues
of Violet Sickert, who wants to ruin the gala event. The characters are
no mere ninepins: all are accorded a specific weight and detailed background
to give them solidity. Looming behind is a more numinous presence, however,
expressed as everything from a Zen-inspired nothingness to a mysterious
waft of cool air. Coincidental meetings become patterns, which in turn become
the hidden order of life itself. In fact, The Storm evokes the 1930s
novels of Charles Williams, whose characters grapple with Christian mysticism.
Buechner himself is a Presbyterian minister and has written extensively
on religion.
The novel best illustrates clashes between character and morality and
how they change over time. But the guiding principle isn't rigid dogma so
much as an open receptivity. Or, as Kenzie points out to Willow, "I
believe in everything.... It's why I am never bored." The Storm
is never boring, either. Despite its gusty Florida locale, it's chiefly
preoccupied by the tempests within.
-- David Galef '81
David Galef's most recent books are the novel Turning Japanese
and Second Thoughts, an edited anthology of essays on rereading.
Barnouw Festschrift
On the occasion of the 90th birthday of media man
Erik Barnouw '29, Wide Angle published a Festschrift in his honor.
With contributions from scholars and colleagues, the volume illuminates
the life and work of Barnouw, while showering him with reverent accolades.
Barnouw, who studied English at Princeton, has written 15 books, including
History of Broadcasting in the United States (Oxford University Press,
1966-70), and an autobiography, Media Marathon: A Twentieth Century Memoir
(Duke University Press, 1996). Barnouw has worked and lectured around the
world. (Johns Hopkins University Press, $8)
Background noise
Trying to engage life while living in a consumer culture
Early on in States of Control, female lead Lisa (Jennifer van
Dyck) explains to a friend why she still buys 78's. "All this new technology
only highlights our inability to hear," she says. "A great listener
would...listen to one passage at a time, refusing to move on until she completely
understood what she'd already heard. With 78's you couldn't play a record
while you were doing something else because you had to pay attention. When
LP's were introduced everything became background music." Is it possible
to live an engaged life in a consumer culture filled with background noise?
That's the difficult question writer/director/producer Zack Winestine '81
sets out to explore in his thought-provoking debut feature-length film.
The story centers on Lisa, who feels trapped in her sterile Manhattan
life. Her job in a theater is unchallenging, her film-professor husband
is impotent, and she's unhappy with the novel she has written in her spare
time. At first she turns to friends for advice. She befriends a director
whose anarchistic credo -- "The others, they want property, permanence.
We want no systems, no order, no platitudes, and no programs" -- appeals
to her. Other friends encourage Lisa to pursue her art, leave her husband,
or leave Manhattan for Los Angeles. But Lisa sees that these aren't real
solutions. "No more stories," she writes in her diary. "They
are just an excuse for the failures of my own life." Seeking a more
active engagement with the world, Lisa starts experimenting with the way
she lives. She turns vegetarian. She watches pornography. She forces herself
to stay awake for days until her senses sharpen. Gradually Lisa's experiments
escalate, building toward a much larger, violent act that will change her
life forever.
Winestine's background is as a director of photo-graphy (among his credits
is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which he worked on during a semester
off from Princeton), so it's no surprise that States of Control employs
rich visual imagery. Shots of turbulent skies, leaves, and flames illustrate
Lisa's desire to intensely experience the physical world. Often the camera
lingers on van Dyck's face, capturing Lisa's subtle shifts of mood and recalling
the style of German expressionist films of the 1920s and '30s. As Lisa abandons
the social world of books and plays and conversation, the film similarly
abandons words. In the last part of the film there's almost no dialogue,
only images of Lisa leaving her Manhattan life to take up an independent
life of radical action.
States of Control isn't a film for Hollywood blockbuster buffs:
fans of disaster movies and romantic comedies will find this slow-paced,
introspective film frustrating. But for anyone tired of cookie-cutter characters
and unchallenging plots, States of Control has a lot to offer. (In
fact, States of Control has already found success on the film-festival
circuit: it premiered at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, and
has been selected by the Melbourne Film Festival and the International Filmfestival
Mannheim-Heidelberg, among others.) It's a carefully crafted film in which
nothing is irrelevant or gratuitous; as Lisa would put it, there's no "background
noise." And it's refreshingly ambitious in its willingness to ask big
questions. It's a film that makes you pay attention.
-- Tamsin Todd '92
States of Control (writer/director/producer Zack Winestine '81, coproducer
JoAnne Pawlawski '80) will be released by Phaedre Cinema in April 1999.
Health care
www.md-1.com/ahac/
Health care used to involve the patient,
the doctor, and insurance companies. Now managed care has made the health
care process far more complex. The Websites of physicians J.D. Robinson
'65 (www.md-1.com/ahac/) and Ron Riner '71 (www.rinergroup.com) show how
entrepreneurial Tigers respond to the, well, mess.
Robinson is director of the American Health Advisory Center (AHAC) in
Washington, D.C. The group works with patients who want an independent appraisal,
or health advisory, of the care they get (or don't get) through managed-care
programs. Robinson stresses that the appraisal is free of the time and cost
pressures applied by managed care to cases. Robinson and his staff give
patients and their providers what he terms a "heads up" about
the care and its deficiencies. Writing in a style both understated and biting,
Robinson says of the need for a health advisory, "In a system weighted
towards doing the minimum, it is not possible, in most instances, for an
individual to realize what is not being done."
The idea and its execution sound confusing at first, so Robinson provides
explanations of his ideas and case studies. In one, he worked for three
years with an HIV-positive woman as she grappled with her HMO, giving her
the information required to get the specialist access and drug regimen she
needed. The study includes Robinson's write-up and the woman's own comments
on her treatment and AHAC's role. Robinson's description of the changing
health care system and its terminology is clear and valuable for laypeople
trying to sort out their choices. In sum, a punchy site on a topic of wide
concern.
(In one of those odd bits of information found on Websites, Robinson's
bio concludes, "Jody Robinson is married to singer composer Potomac
Red and is the father of four young children.")
www.rinergroup.com
The riner group in St. Louis provides "health care advisory and
management consulting." Riner's site comes at health care from the
perspective of the practitioner and group whose concerns are split between
medicine and commerce. A Riner quote on the site highlights that relationship:
"Health care business solutions need to make clinical sense. In health
care, good medicine and good patient care is good business." The dual
concerns shape the site's content, as well as Riner's work. It seeks more
"efficiency and effectiveness" in practices. In staking out a
niche, Riner says, "We specialize in professional-to-professional communication,
strategic planning, information exchange and education concerning the business
of medicine and the successful implementation and translation of business
issues into efficient and productive clinical practice."
The site covers the basics of the practice, although it lacks case studies
that show Riner's accomplishments. The list of links is extensive. The site
provides online versions of Riner's Mediscene newsletter, which primarily
covers the business trends such as practice acquisition, Medicare payments,
and liability, with the occasional chart on cancer and mortality trends.
-- Van Wallach '80
My Hiroshima
The horror must be known in human terms:
the blinding, maiming, burning, vaporising...
sixty-six thousand men, women, children
killed immediately or died soon afterwards.
That many more, so horribly injured:
suffering radiation sickness -- many carried
mutations in their genes, affecting unborn
generations. The suffering untold,
immeasurable by any calculus
of pain, incalculable their psychological
suffering: the hibakusha,
explosion-affected persons they are called.
At the epicenter of the city's heart
four square miles were utterly destroyed.
An excerpt from an epic poem called My Hiroshima, by Richard
J. Schoeck *49, an adjunct professor of English at the University of Kansas.
Of his poem, Schoeck explains, "I have endeavored to write the story
of the bombing of Hiroshima as an epic, while construing the genre as multi-faceted
and demanding many voices, as well as introducing various lyric forms. I
have drawn upon my own personal experience (sometimes simply contemporaneous,
but always, I trust, at least thematically relevant) in order to add one
further thread of unity to the poem." (Mellen Poetry Press, $14.95)
Relating to a teenager's growing
pains
Julian Thompson '49's novels address contemporary issues
Mental illness, white supremacists, filial devotion, and budding romance:
that, in a nutshell, is what Julian F. Thompson '49 tackles in his 16th
novel, Brothers.
Sound heavy duty for seventh through 12th graders to handle? Not to Thompson.
Big issues and relationships are what concern teens, he says, a conclusion
he draws from 24 years as an educator and coach. To this he adds decision-making
situations, occasional irreverence for authority, and a strong dose of humor.
In his young adult classic, The Grounding of Group 6, Thompson created
a satiric thriller about teens sent to a boarding school so that their parents
could be permanently rid of them. In Band of Angels, named an American
Library Association Best Book in 1986, a cadre of teens campaign against
nuclear war, unaware that government agents are trying to kill them. In
Brothers (Knopf, 1998), 17-year-old Chris journeys outwardly cross
country and inwardly toward maturity to rescue his older, mentally ill brother
Cam, who has fallen in with a militia group.
What fuels Thompson's writing is his sympathy for teenagers and their
growing pains. Of the many titles he's held, the one he values most is "friend."
"I have their talk in my head," Thompson says. "I've got
great respect for teenagers. In our society, many people judge them harshly,
rage against things like if they wear a baseball cap backwards. To me they've
always been so honest, so sweet, so open."
While still a teen himself, Thompson coached baseball, and during free
time from history studies at Princeton he visited juveniles at the State
Home for Boys in Jamesburg, New Jersey. After graduation, he returned to
his high school, the Lawrenceville School, to teach and direct boarding
school students. Later he helped 13 expelled public-school students, accused
of inciting the 1967 riots in Trenton, earn diplomas. He also helped a group
of teens found an alternative high school called Changes in East Orange,
New Jersey, where for seven years he served as administrator, teacher, counselor,
even janitor. "I understood where they were coming from," he says
of these youngsters. "It was just given to me to be that way, to be
sympathetic to feelings adolescents have as they try to work out where they
are trying to go."
Thompson's fascination with writing began with his father, Julian F.
Thompson '11, an attorney who wrote plays as a hobby (The Warrior's Husband
featured Katharine Hepburn in her first Broadway starring role). The senior
Thompson died when his son was 12. Scholarships to Lawrenceville and Princeton
financed Thompson's education, but he recalls often feeling like an outsider
in those worlds. He found his niche working with teens.
Thompson left Lawrenceville once to write an unpublished novel about
the Cuban revolution. At Changes, now defunct, Thompson offered a writing
seminar in which he also completed the assignments he gave his pupils. Later
he decided to give writing a second shot. He and his wife, Polly, an oil
painter he hired as art teacher for Changes, moved to Vermont, where they
have a winter house in Burlington and a summer retreat in southern Vermont.
A Columbia Pictures movie option for The Grounding of Group 6
never materialized, but Thompson still hopes a film might be made someday.
In the meantime, he's at work on his next book, a pirate adventure in the
Bermuda Triangle, due out after his 50th reunion.
-- Maria LoBiondo
Books Received
The Sinus Sourcebook, by Deborah F. Rosin '85 (Lowell House,
$26.00) -- A layperson's guide to sinus and sinus-related problems,
including symptoms and prevention techniques. Rosin is a physician in central
New Jersey.
The True Story of Grizzly Adams, by Robert M. McClung '39 (Beech
Tree Books, $4.95) -- A biography of the famous frontiersman, written
for elementary and high school students.
Say, Could That Lad Be I? A 20th Century Journey, by Peter Schwed
'32 (Bennett Books, $25) -- A memoir of the author's life.
Schwed was formerly publisher and editorial chairman of Simon & Schuster.
The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, by Mark
Steiner *72 (Harvard, $39.95) -- Challenging dominant naturalistic
views, Steiner argues that the success of mathematical physics appears to
assign the human mind a special place in the cosmos. The author is a professor
of philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Cities on the Rebound: A Vision for Urban America, by William H. Hudnut
III '54 (Urban Land Institute, $21.95) -- The author proposes
a variety of strategies for successful cities, including partnership, collaboration,
diversity, and global vision. Hudnut is a former congressman and four-term
mayor of Indianapolis.
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