K.M. Soehnlein

Not under the Updike spell

 I know it's unseemly to speak ill of the dead, but in the midst of the rushing winds of praise for the late John Updike, I've been recalling the piece of his writing that made the strongest impression on me -- a decidedly negative one. In 1999 Updike reviewed Allan Hollinghurst's novel, The Spell, for the New Yorker. The Spell is an unapologetic and unmistakable example of gay fiction -- it concerns a quartet of gay men, including a father and son, along with their lovers and friends, and it doesn't shy away from their sex lives. It's written by an acclaimed gay author, about the intimate lives of realistic, flawed gay characters, and it painted a complicated portrait of 90s gay life. And yet when the New Yorker assigned a reviewer, they chose in Updike not only a heterosexual one, but one who displayed a hostile reaction to the very notion of the lives the novel depicted -- a reviewer who seemed, in a most unsophisticated way, rather shocked at what he found.

Updike -- whose portraits of married, suburban heterosexuals have always been trumpeted as "iconic" and "universal" -- chided Hollinghurst's novels for being "relentlessly gay in their personnel." Finding among Hollinghurst's characters very few women, Updike managed to both exalt and patronize the entire gender: "after a while you begin to long for the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character." (Chirp? Really?) But perhaps the cruelest blow was Updike's statement that "novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous … involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family" -- implying that novels about homosexual partnering were just a lot of "fevered sex." Never mind that Hollinghurst's novel was centered in a family household; the fact that father and son were both gay made the whole enterprise not "sacred." These are shopworn and insidious charges, revived every time gay men seek to claim a place in the culture: at our core, we're unholy, uncivilized, unstable.

Updike's review set off a strong reaction among gay and lesbian writers, who knew an attack when they read one. Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman and Craig Lucas responded with outrage in the press and instigated a letter-writing campaign (though it's not clear that the New Yorker ever published any). Updike remained unapologetic for the homophobic tenor of his review, telling the New York Observer that when it came to homosexuality, "I'd be happy not to discuss it. ... Hollinghurst made it kind of tough." So, you see, it was the relentlessly gay author who forced the iconically straight reviewer to speak those terrible truths.

There are so few outlets for reviews of any kind that when an author of Hollinghurst's stature (he went on to win the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty) is granted one of those precious, high-profile slots, he should be evaluated by someone who can do his work justice -- at the very least by someone who isn't inherently put off by his project. The Spell may not be for everyone, but it deserved the respect that any other book would have gotten; more than that, it deserved a level of evaluation that placed it within its literary tradition. Updike never recanted his words, and I suspect I'm not the only gay writer who hasn't forgotten them.

For me, Updike's pronouncements speak to the larger, and ongoing, problem of the marginalizing of gay-themed fiction. Michael Bronski, writing at the time of the Updike/Hollinghurst brouhaha, noted: "The separation of 'gay lit' from 'American lit' ... mirrors the dominant culture's profound desire to view homosexual experience as fundamentally different."

In the ten years that followed, Updike didn't seem to grown any more comfortable with non-hetero-sexuality. Case in point, his less offensive but somehow still clueless review of Andrew Sean Greer's Story of a Marriage (2008). In this novel, a woman learns her husband has had a male lover in his past; Updike's mostly unflattering review speaks of the "ambiguities of intimacy and bisexuality" and the "fragile strangeness" of Greer's "theme." The idea of bisexuality as ambiguous is yet another tired idea; and Greer's overall theme of how best to love someone you may not really possess isn't particularly strange or "fragile," whatever that would mean.

By all accounts, Updike had his charms; as a writer himself, he certainly made his mark. But as his legacy is bathed in honey, I'll take my chances at mixing a little vinegar into the potion. May he rest in peace; may his bias be buried with him.

Friends With Books: Catherine, Mary, Ada, Mattilda

Friends with books are making news all over the Interweb.

The new short story collection I'm most excited about has just been released: Catherine Brady's The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories. Catherine (or "Kate") and I are in a monthly writers' group, so I've been devouring her beautifully crafted stories in their early drafts for the past few years. Now the world gets to share the wealth. Kate's been honored before by the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Best American Short Stories -- this collection will surely bring more deserved attention her way. I hear there's a release party coming soon. Yay, Kate!

Mary Patrick Kavanaugh -- one of my former students -- had been trying to get the publishing world's attention for her novel, Family Plots: Love, Death and Tax Evasion. Having failed to do so, she staged a very public funeral, "burying" her dream of publishing (watch the festivities here). As it turns out, this got her -- and her now-self-published novel -- a lot of attention. Way to make lemonade, Mary.

Ada Limon -- whose poetry collection, Lucky Wreck, has a lyrical, conversational voice, as if you're listening to her talk intimately, sometimes heatedly, from one table over -- shows up on the Poetry Foundation site offering Five Ways to Practice Poetry. She's got plenty of useful reminders for aspiring writers, like "Cultivate silence... Your own voice is the only thing your poetry needs." Thanks, Ada.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, back from book-tour-land, is interviewed on The Rumpus, and you know he speaks his mind. Mattilda has been chronicling queer, sex-worker, activist/artist life in San Francisco on the page and in performance for years. Now there's a new book that collects this addictive, caustic, wry, observant, effusive writing: So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. I've started reading it, and I'm hooked. Good work, Mattilda.

The Inaugural Poet in the Age of the Internet

Elizabeth Alexander seemed to be having a grand old time with Stephen Colbert last night, fielding such classic Colbert accusation-questions as "What's the difference between a metaphor...and a lie?" I was glad to see the inaugural poet looking cheerful and keeping up with Mr. Sarcasm, especially considering the backlash she's faced.

Call it the challenge of the poet in the age of the internet. Alexander's Praise Song for the Day has likely been commented upon more than any other poem of the 21st century. The New York Times's online "parsing" -- which referred archaically to Alexander as a "poetess" --  had, as of this writing, almost 250 comments. They gave decidedly mixed praise, with many commenters savaging both the poem and Alexander's delivery of it. Many of those reactions demonstrate a basic lack of understanding about what poetry should do. Were people expecting a Shakespearean sonnet? An epic from Tennyson? A bunch of rhymed lines? Does anyone understand what free verse is?

Alexander faced an impossible task. She was reading at the most anticipated inauguration in living memory, to a crowd of millions, most of whom probably don't read poetry or hear it read in public. The simplicity of her diction, and the slowness of her pace, struck me as taking this reality into account. Also, she was sandwiched in the lineup between President Obama himself, a gifted and seasoned orator (with a speechwriting staff, it should be noted) and the strangely juvenile, rhymed prayer of pastor Joseph Lowery (whom Jon Stewart called "the most adorable civil rights legend I've ever seen"). Alexander, a college professor who read with poise if not with fire, was doomed to be an also-ran.

The critic-class hasn't been particularly kind, either. The New Republic's Adam Kirsch took her to task for being a "bureaucratic poet" (which is apparently one who writes "for a book and not for an inauguration," as if poetry isn't a form for the page even when it's read aloud). Edward Byrne at the Valparaiso Review cites a number of other negative reactions to the poem before offering his own conclusion that the place for poetry is not at public occasions.

I find myself frustrated by all of this professional grumbling, much of it petty, even unfair. I was instantly won over by Alexander's poem, which struck me not only as appropriate for the occasion in the way it evoked the depth of the moment and looked to the future as one based in the word ("In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, / any thing can be made, any sentence begun"), but for the transparency of its intentions. So much contemporary poetry is enraptured with its own complexity and difficulty, favoring experimentation over communication and abstraction over the truth in material things. I agree with Mark Doty  -- who'd all along been my wish for inaugural poet -- when he gave Alexander her props by noting "the clarity, dignity and grace" of her language. Alexander succeeded in marrying her theme and form to Obama's own.

Now that the poem itself has been published, and I can read it again in its intended form, with the poet's own line breaks and punctuation,  I like it even more. I think -- dare I say it -- that it was the perfect poem for the occasion.

Perhaps Elizabeth Alexander said it best when Stephen Colbert asked her why she didn't use "language that soared": "What was powerful about [Obama's] campaign, it was about the people, many people investing in this country. He said, it's not about me, it's about us." Alexander's poem honored that, beautifully.

Praise Song for the Day: Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural ooem

Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States of America. After giving his rather sobering address, the context of which was downturn and crisis, and the emphasis of which were themes of responsibility, sacrifice and the work to be done -- hopefully, optimisitically, it should be added -- the podium was handed over to poet Elizabeth Alexander who then did in lyric what Obama had done in rhetoric: honored the past, surveyed the citizenry and then set us philosophically on a course for the next leg of our national journey.

I transcribed Alexander's poem, Praise Song for the Day, and am excited to post it below, with my guesses as to line breaks and punctuation (to be corrected later when the official text is released*). Her poem was a perfect illustration for why we still need poetry. Speaking artfully, rich in metaphor, but determined to "say it plain," she offered a "praise song" for the lowly -- slaves, laborers, those who repair "things in need of repair," those who write "hand lettered signs" and who figure things out "at kitchen tables," those who make music.

Interestingly, a praise song is a Christian form that "highlights the emphasis on personal encounter with God over intellectual understanding." In ending her poem not by invoking God but by invoking Love -- "love that casts a widening pool of light" -- Alexander has created a secular-humanist praise song, one fitting for a democratic state occasion.

This poem thrills me. I had high hopes going in, and Elizabeth Alexander exceeded them.

Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business
Walking past each other
Catching each others' eyes or not
About to speak or speaking
All about us is noise
All about us is noise and bramble thorn and din
Each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem
Darning a hole in a uniform
Patching a tire
Repairing the things in need of repair
Someone is trying to make music somewhere
With a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum
With cello, boombox, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus
A farmer considers the changing sky
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words
Words spiny or smooth
Whispered or declaimed
Words to consider, reconsider
We cross dirt roads and highways
That mark the will of someone and then others who said
I need to see what’s on the other side
I know there’s something better down the road
We need to find a place where we are safe
We walk into that which we cannot yet see

Say it plain
That many have died for this day
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here
Who laid the train tracks
Raised the bridges
Picked the cotton and the lettuce
Built brick by brick the glittering edifices
They would then keep clean and work inside of

Praise song for struggle
Praise song for the day
Praise song for every hand lettered sign
The figuring it out at kitchen tables

Some live by “love thy neighbor as thyself”
Others by “first do no harm” or “take no more than you need”
What if the mightiest word is love
Love beyond marital filial national
Love that casts a widening pool of light
Love with no need to preempt grievance

In today’s sharp sparkle
This winter air
Any thing can be made
Any sentence begun
On the brink
on the brim
on the cusp
Praise song for walking forward in that light.

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* UPDATE: The correct lineation of Alexander's poem is now available. Interestingly, it has far fewer line breaks than I'd imagined; indeed, sections of it are essentially written as prose. I've left my interpretation in this post, a record of my inaugural-morning experiment: what I heard based on Alexander's recitation, versus what was actually on the page.

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* UPDATE 2: The above update's link to the poem was wrong: released by a "transcription service," not by the poet herself. The actual text of Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day can now be read. Line breaks and all.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance

At the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson delivered a "prayer for our nation and for our next president" [text] that was as radical as any I've ever heard at a public occasion. Calling on a "God of our many understandings" he launched into an unlikely list of blessings: tears, anger, discomfort and -- my favorite -- "freedom from mere tolerance," which seemed to strike at the heart of so much bigotry, especially of the variety that gay people experience. Remember when Sarah Palin, during the v.p. debate, insisted that gays should be "tolerated," as if that was the best that we should expect from our leaders? The video of Robinson's speech is currently on YouTube; catch it now before HBO takes it down.*

Also infusing the pre-Inauguration event with activist fervor was the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, whose joyous rendition of This Land is Your Land, with Bruce Springsteen at his side, included a timely verse about the ills of private property:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

After a long campaign, and these many months where Barack Obama has had to continually remind us that there's "only one president at a time," I couldn't be more ready for tomorrow.

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* UPDATE: Towleroad reports that Robinson's invocation -- already being dubbed "controversial" because of its inclusiveness -- was not shown by HBO, based on a decision by the Obama Inauguration Team to have Robinson speak as part of the pre-show before the president-elect even took the stage. So was Robinson's inclusion, in the end, a kind of "mere tolerance" on the part of the new administration? After Elton is following the story.

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* UPDATE 2: Robinson's moment to be included HBO's rebroadcast of the event [After Elton].

First Writer

Among all the ways Barack Obama's administration will, I hope, bring something different to Washington, one that is near and dear to me is this: We'll actually have a writer in the White House. At the peak of my Obama-love this summer, I read his memoir, Dreams From My Father. I was totally absorbed -- and happy to discover that Obama's ability to inspire through his speeches was an outgrowth of his genuine talent for creating compelling stories on the page.

Obama wrote Dreams when he was in his early 30s, after his time at Harvard and before he had entered politics. As such, it doesn't read like a template for how to win an election (his second book, The Audacity of Hope, was that). Instead, it's like a classic coming-of-age novel. It charts an emotional journey of personal identity, it paints its characters and settings in vivid strokes, and it keeps you turning the pages. It's also an opportunity for insight into the man's character, unfiltered by the pressures of campaigning and governing. You get the feeling that Obama wrote this for the same reason that all memoirists do -- to explore, understand and exorcise his demons. To work some emotional shit out.

Dreams From My Father make use of a variety of different prose techniques. The writing style shifts as the narrator grows. First, there's Barry, the brown kid with the white mother, trying to absorb his multicultural family history and make sense of the various places he's been thrust into all over the globe. The writing here is wide-eyed, the narrator a sponge.

Later, there's Barack, trying on angry-young-man attitude in college and then channeling that energy as an organizer among the housing projects of Chicago. The style here moves back and forth between vivid dialogue and moody introspection. Many ideals are reached for; many cigarettes are smoked.

And then there's the amalgamation of both Barry and Barack, who visits Kenya for the first time in his 20s and finds that his African relatives project all kinds of different hopes and identities onto him, each of them based on some aspect of the legacy of his mysterious, dead father, whose name he shares but whom he never knew. Here, other characters scramble for attention; there's even a long section that is essentially a transcribed narrative of the Obama clan's history, as recited by Obama's grandmother.

I was especially captivated in Chapter Five, set during his early years in college, when he struggles most with the implications of his identity. Because I'm only a handful of years younger than him, I found myself remembering well the intensity of campus politics in those days, when students were organizing and pressuring their administrations to divest from apartheid South Africa. (For Obama, his personal-is-political struggle had to do with his mixed-race identity; for me, the struggle back then was about navigating the coming out process.) As he drinks and smokes and parties and dates, College Barack takes his first steps toward finding his political voice. He wants to belong to a community, but he doesn't know if he really fits in, so he tries on a little bit of everything:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

With the inauguration around the corner, Obama's writing is getting a lot of attention. SantaCruz.com, calling him the Storyteller-in-Chief, asks if Obama is "too awesome to be president." (What other president-to-be has ever included the words "punk-rock performance poets" in his memoirs?!) In the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens answers that question by analyzing what makes Obama a "cool cat" ("cat" in the bebop-50s-James-Baldwin way, that is...)

In the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Raban says Obama is the best writer of any president since Lincoln. He compares Obama's realistic writing style with his team-of-rivals governing approach, claiming that both signify "the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer's imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world." Well said.

I'd like to think that the man who had the discipline and courage to set down his own personal journey in a captivating memoir will retain -- even through the unimaginable pressures of being President of this sprawling, needy country -- the power to think for himself, carefully, in order to find the truth inside our national story.

More readers?

The National Endowment for the Arts released a study this week that shocked everyone with its finding that more people are reading fiction than they were in 2002, the last time this was measured. That's right, more, not fewer -- thus changing "a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading" [NY Times] No one seems to know why, according to the Times, though this little tidbit, slipped into the middle of the article, has been cited as having everything to do with it: "Internet reading was included in the 2008 data." As someone who hopes to see books made accessible via the technologies that people use every minute of every day -- like novels available via iPhone applications -- I felt encouraged by all of this. It brought to mind Kevin Smokler's introduction to his anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (which includes one of my essays) in which he wrote, four years ago: "...the world of books will be totally different tomorrow than it is today, and it will happen much sooner than we think."

But not so fast. It seems the data may not be all its cooked up to be. The most comprehensive analysis I've seen of the NEA findings and methodology comes from Caleb Crain, who writes on his memorably titled blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything, that the news may not be as good as it seemed at first. Looking at long-term trends, he concludes, "the numbers are good, but they're not that good. … Over the longer span, we're still talking about a decline."

I think Crain may be overly pessimisstic, however, when he claims that "online substitutions may be taking place, but they're probably not 'literary...'" Why "probably not"? Younger readers, including students, are certainly subsituting reading-on-screens for reading-on-paper -- and surely some of what they're reading qualifies as "literature." Think of Google Books. Or Project Gutenberg, which catalogs 27,000 classics. Many literary journals now exist solely online -- and journals are where most short stories are published these days. Many of my creative writing students publish their first work through online outlets. So I'm not ready to dismiss the NEA findings out of hand, though Crain's thorough analysis is a splash of cold water on the celebration, for sure.

Secretary of the Arts?

Old man of music Quincy Jones said in an interview last month that he's "working on" getting President-elect Obama to establish a position for a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts, akin to a Minister of Culture like those in Europe and elsewhere. I'm not sure I completely get Jones's assertion, as expressed in this rather rambling interview, that such a position would have prevented "situations like Columbine." But if some actual arts policy advocates got behind this, it could become a viable proposal, one that everyone I know would see as a major sign of change.

Today, I received a request to sign an online petition urging for a U.S. Secretary of the Arts. I rarely sign these things, because hitting the send-button strikes me as a lazy way to participate in a democracy; you think you're doing something valuable, but are you simply tossing your power into the void of cyberspace? At the same time, as of January 12, this petition had more signatures than any other being hosted at Petition Online. So who knows? Maybe it's an idea whose time has really come.

Curiosity is love. Ignorance is nemesis.

My favorite moment from the Golden Globes was Colin Farrell's acceptance speech. He won best actor is a comedy for In Bruges [haven't seen it], and seemed truly surprised and ad hoc when it was time to speak -- a bit jittery [cute] but also self-possessed and, dare I say it, inspirational. [As of this post, there's only one video of the speech on You Tube, which includes annoying interruptive commentary by whoever taped it.] Here's the text, more or less, from my transcription:

Cheers, thank you, thanks a million, thanks. They must of done the counting in Florida. Em. Eh. I’m actually shocked, truly, to even get the nomination to be here, eh, and to part of such a piece… I have to of course got to thank my father … Catholic guilt, the Irish Catholic thing. My mother, father, brother, two beautiful sisters. Yeah. Eh.

Martin, thank you for not listening to me when I asked you to cast someone else. I’ve never been so at peace with being ignored in my life.

It’s seldom that you get a script that’s simultaneously profound and beautifully comic and wonderfully painful, filled with delightful remorse and more than anything else the sweetest, sweetest redemptive qualities. And that was In Bruges for me. And to work with Martin was a dream and I love you.

You know I’ll ride Sally’s coattails and start talking about love a bit because I think at the end of the day what we all do in some shape or form is about love. I hate to wax lyrical, but curiosity is love, ignorance is nemesis. *

Brendan this is at least half of yours…. [shout out to co-star Brendan Gleeson]

There’s some people that I’ve worked with in the last eight years since I’ve been doing this. They kind of transcend the functions that they serve creatively and professionally in my life. I have an agent, two agents and a lawyer, and a publicist that I actually love, also, dearly…. [names] who have more than anything, ehm, guided me with decency and compassion and have allowed me over the years to believe that what we do is nothing to do business, but is a dream that is born of that curiosity I spoke of earlier, and is  a playground for imagination and for the exploration of thought and feeling. And that’s why they’re so cool and that’s why I’m the luckiest actor around.

It’s a bit late for brown nosing now...[followed by brown-nosing the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but funny]

We should all be so lucky to have a playground for our imaginations. He's Irish, he's eloquent, and he's got a statue in his hand a couple years after his sex tape was all over the Internet. Eat that for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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In addition to having a typo in the title of my original post, it seems I got the best part of his quotation wrong: "Curiosity is love. It's ignorance's nemesis." Makes more sense, though I liked my mis-hearing, too. That'll teach me to post at 2 a.m.... perhaps.

Revolutionary Road, an adaptation

Books aren't “made” into movies as much as gutted and restuffed. Having turned my own novel into a screenplay, I'm aware of what needs to happen to make the leap: a lot of cutting away of the source material, and then a lot of putting-in of scenes that weren't there to begin with, to make the story work in this new medium. Seeing the film adaptation of a book you’ve enjoyed is often disappointing -- your favorites scenes are missing, the actors don't resemble the way you've pictured the characters in your mind -- which is why I usually recommend doing it the other way around. See the movie, then go back to the source. The flow seems more expansive this way.

Revolutionary Road began as a novel by Richard Yates, one that has apparently had a long troubled history trying to get to the screen. When the new film directed by Sam Mendes and written by Justin Haythe was first announced in 2007, Yates biographer Blake Bailey chronicled the novel's 40-year stalled history of not making it to the screen. Offering (unsolicited) advice to the production team, Bailey wrote:

...Yates meant for the Wheelers to seem a little better than mediocre… the Wheelers are everyday people -- you and me -- who pretend to be something they're not because life is lonely and dull and disappointing. Were Yates alive to advise Mendes, I daresay he'd insist that the movie begin, as the novel does, with April's mortifyingly awful performance in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest. In other words, the Wheelers' doom should never be in doubt because they can't help being themselves.

Mendes and Haythe did indeed find a way to begin the film with April’s disastrous play, or at least its aftereffects. As for the doubt or certainty of the Wheelers’ doom, not knowing where the story was going (not having read the novel), I did find myself wondering how the de-evolution of the Wheelers' marriage might be redeemed. Maybe I'm just a sucker for hope, but I kept thinking it would get a little better after it got so much worse.

The film covers the same turf as the highly pleasurable Mad Men -- the conformist pressures of the post-WWII boom years -- but unlike that show the film puts every emotion and out there on the surface. Mad Men is all subtext with a mischievous wink of the eye. Rev Road is all blame and brutality. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler explode at each other in the third scene of the film -- so intensely that when the title suddenly comes up on screen, you want to laugh out loud, from the cold realization that if the film is starting with this much intensity, where will it possibly go from here? It's gonna be a bumpy ride on those freshly paved suburban streets.

Does that mean the adaptation has failed its source? BlorkBlog, admiring the novel, notes that "subtext is one of the beauties of Revolutionary Road," and perhaps some of that went by the wayside once the novel became a vehicle for A-list stars. But I think that the urge to laugh at the largeness of emotions on display is a sign of nervous recognition. It's my guess that much of the truth Yates wanted to convey -- the brutality, the "depressing" quality of lives not fully lived, the way love festers when lovers are constrained -- has surely been preserved. When April pleaded with Frank through red-rimmed eyes, asking, "Who made these rules?", more than a shiver of recognition went through the theater. Apparently many of us are still asking that question, decades later.

Yates himself was exemplary of the doomed, broken down, mid-20th century novelist -- booze, misery, institutionalizaton, his books praised but not selling, his hopes raised then crushed by Hollywood. He was a manic-depressive accused by reviewers and readers of writing depressing books.

The film will, I suppose, both redeem Yates and confirm his reputation as being not for everyone. It's a high-end production, strongly acted, artfully composed, memorably scored. Acclaim will follow, and maybe some awards. And yet the "hopelessness and emptiness" that its characters can't surpass will surely stand in the way of turning it a crowd-pleaser, and might scare potential readers. Will audience members keep their distance from Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (the title of his 1962 short story collection, the only of his works I've read)? Or will they want to know more, drawn into its explosive fires like moths to flame?