Joe's View

We meet four generations of Italian and Italian-American women in Louise Shaffer’s moving and charming novel, “Serendipity” (Ballantine Books), but she manages to give us a story with the heft of an epic without back-breaking size — the writer takes us from pre-World War II New Haven to contemporary Manhattan in 327 pages.
The story begins in 2008 with 37-year-old Carrie Manning coping with the death of her philanthropic celebrity mother, Rose, who had access to lots of money, but gave most of it away in a limelight-shunning manner that, ironically, made her one of the most famous and respected women in the city.
Carrie grew up without knowing her grandmother Lu Lawson, a fabled star of Broadway musicals in the 1960s and ’70s. Rose broke off communication with her mother when Carrie was very young and would never discuss what caused the rift.
The warm and breezy opening chapters set in the city last year suggest that “Serendipity” is going to be an above-average chick lit novel, with Carrie stuck at a crossroads in life — in addition to just burying her mom, we learn that she has broken off her engagement to a seemingly perfect guy who still adores her.
Carrie has never been able to focus on a job long enough for it to become a career — she started a highly successful gourmet candy business with her best friend, Zoe, but soon lost interest and took a buy-out.
Zoe has been Carrie’s closest friend since they were New York City school girls — she keeps pushing Carrie to return to the candy business and reconsider her rejection of Mr. Right.
What changes the tone and structure of the book — as well as Carrie’s life — is the grieving daughter’s decision to find out why her mother and grandmother stopped speaking. Lu is still alive, but Carrie decides to start with one of her elderly uncles in Connecticut and then one of Lu’s retired Broadway collaborators.
Through her conversations with these two men, Carrie journeys back to the New Haven of the 1930s and the struggle between young Lu and her Italian immigrant mother Mifalda over the girl’s desire to have a career in show business and to be an independent young woman.
“Serendipity” is then off on a fascinating view of the struggle between Old World parents and their New World children, show business from the World War II era through the 1970s, and the unearthing of family secrets.
Each of the four women is fascinating, but the heart of the novel draws on Shaffer’s own background as a New York actress in the 1970s — any fan of the Broadway theater will get a big kick out of the behind-the-scenes look into a golden age of musical theater when a star like Lu could go from one show to another without ever thinking of TV or film jobs. For those of us who spent time in Manhattan during the 1970s, the book is a refreshing corrective to the widely held view that the city was unliveable in those days — Manhattan might have been a little gritty and rundown, but the theater was abuzz with landmark shows such as “A Chorus Line” and “Company.”
Shaffer’s novel is hard to categorize — it combines historical fiction with elements of romance novels and chick lit. There is also a large vein of mystery in Carrie trying to discover the real reason for the break between Lu and Rose.
Whatever you call it, “Serendipity” is a very satisfying reading experience.

People in the theatre — and people who write about the theatre — have a tendency toward hysteria and hyperbole, but the performance Judith Ivey is giving in “The Glass Menagerie” at Long Wharf Theatre is quite amazing.
I’ve seen so many bad productions of the Tennessee Williams play — most especially the godawful Broadway revival with Jessica Lange a few seasons ago — that the thought of another night out at this “memory” piece about mothers and children and family responsibility gave me the willies.
But, Ivey is one of my favorite actresses and she has a way of grounding almost any play with humor and gritty realism, so I had a hunch she might blow the cobwebs off this warhorse.
My hunch was well-founded. Under the direction of LWT artistic director Gordon Edelstein, Ivey makes “The Glass Menagerie” feel newly minted.
Who knew there were so many laughs in the character of the faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield?
And that those laughs could be produced without sacrificing the Williams poetry and the poignance of Keira Kelley’s presentation of poor “crippled” Laura’s fixation on her glass animals?
Who would have thought that a contemporary actress could find a universal essence of motherhood in such a specifically Southern play, written more than a half century ago?
Ivey made me believe she had spent decades joking and arguing with her grown son Tom — the Williams stand-in played so well by Patch Darragh in this production — and that with a fierce combination of love and steamroller guilt she always gets her way (something the woman has expected ever since she was a beautiful, teasing girl juggling dozens of “gentleman callers” back home in Mississippi).
Run, do not walk, to this legend-in-the-making presentation of “The Glass Menagerie,” which is only playing through June 7.
Last night, there were lots of empty seats in the house — a scandal considering what transpired on the stage — but the combination of a rave in The New York Times on Tuesday and what is bound to be fantastic word of mouth should soon make this into one of the hottest tickets of the season.

John Wray has been extravagantly praised for his third novel, “Lowboy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and you only have to read a few pages to see why — it’s a gripping, funny, and original variation on the urban coming-of-age novel that follows a 16-year-old schizophrenic on a “Warriors”-style journey through the New York City subway system.
Will Heller stops taking his medication and flees the facility in which he is a patient to go off on an odyssey through the underground world that fascinates him.
Wray puts us in the teen’s head as his psychological disorder escalates and he begins to believe he holds the fate of the entire world in his hands.
The book dramatizes the early stages of the development of one of those sad, deranged souls to be seen wandering the tunnels and streets of Manhattan.
Will is still very young and strikingly good-looking during the “Lowboy” adventure — he draws the sexual attention of more than one woman — but we can imagine what his life might be like 10 or 20 years down the road.
Wray juggles a love for New York and its underworld with a keen awareness of the dangers that can be found off the beaten path, particularly if you are in no position to defend yourself.
Will’s hyper-awareness of the excitement of city life comes through on almost every page — even when he is in the midst of imminent danger:
“The city was newlooking, glistening in the daylight, an onion with its outer skin sloughed off. He saw dimes in the pavement and vinecovered housefronts and old useless flagpoles and shopping bags hanging like vampire bats from the trees. He saw awnings and bellpulls and limos and dogs dressed in parkas. There were so many things to see that he got dizzy. Babies see the world this way, he thought. Then they forget.”
Wray crosscuts between Will and his frantic and strangely disoriented mother, Violet, as she and a cop who specializes in missing persons try to find the boy.
The policeman, Ali Lateef, is a wonderfully unstereotypical detective who often gives the book the air of a literary thriller.
The subway is the real star of “Lowboy,” however, including a wondrous setpiece in the long-abandoned City Hall station.
It isn’t surprising to learn that Wray decided to try to write as much of the novel as he could on long underground rides through a city that clearly bewitches him as much as it does Will.

American moviegoers looking for lucid storytelling and mature drama have learned that there is rarely a place for them in the mutliplexes during the summer.
Once the would-be Oscar contenders and Oscar winners have had their day in the sun during the first few months of the year, it is basically kiddie time at the local bijou.
Who over the age of 15 wants to see “Terminator Salvation” or a sequel to “Night at the Museum”?
Fortunately, the art film distruibutors have learned to release some of their best foreign and indie fare during the summer for adults who are desperate to see a movie with substance.
A prime example of this smart “counterprogramming” is “Summer Hours,” the superb new French film about a wealthy, scattered clan trying to figure out what to do with the home and possessions of their mother.
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the drama deals with that struggle most of us go through when someone we love dies — how do we hold on to the memories of a wonderful relationship without being swamped by nostalgia and grief?
We meet the matriarch Helene (Edith Scob) and her three grown children — Frederic (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) — in a warm and frantic opening sequence showing their final summer reunion at Helene’s beautiful, rambling country home.
The three “children” are there to celebrate mom’s 75th birthday. She levels with Frederic about the need to start thinking about how her estate will be settled after her death — in addition to the very valuable country estate, Helene has lots of important art work and furnishings left to her by a beloved uncle who was a famous painter.
We can see right away that Frederic is more involved with family life and family history than his younger siblings — Adrienne lives in New York City where she works as a designer and Jeremie is a businessman tied to Puma in China.
Assayas captures that melancholy air surrounding annual summer get togethers where the scattering of modern families becomes more apparent with each passing year — relationships that used to be daily affairs are now a once-a-year occasion.
The director introduces us to all of the major characters in a deceptively informal manner — we meet the wives of the two brothers and their children as well as the elderly maid Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan).
“Summer Hours” moves forward several months — after Helene’s death — and we get the heart of the story: how the family reacts to the loss of the woman who was really the only thing holding them together.
Frederic wants to keep the country home and its art objects as a shrine to Helene and a place for continuing family reunions. Adrienne and Jeremie level with the brother — their lives and careers are not likely to allow for many visits to France, so it makes more sense to sell Helene’s home and art and to divide the proceeds three ways.
The people in “Summer Hours” are loving and reasonable so there are no big emotional explosions, but Assayas very subtly shows us the tension between the siblings.
He also allows us to share Frederic’s profound feeling of loss — the man’s painful recognition of the fact that without Helene, there won’t be much of an extended family life for him in the future.
(“Summer Hours” is now playing at the Avon Theatre in Stamford and is scheduled to open at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in New Haven on June 5.)

Lee Child’s 13th Jack Reacher novel, “Gone Tomorrow” (Delacorte Press), landed in bookstores Tuesday .
The thrillers about a loner ex-military policeman have become a global publishing phenomenon — 22 million copies in print and the last two books debuted in the number one position on The New York Times bestseller list — so the author no longer needs the endorsement of reviewers.
But, Child deserves high praise for keeping a crime fiction series at such a high level of achievement for more than a decade — indeed, the new one might be the best Reacher adventure yet because of its mind-boggling opening sequence and the fact that Child adds several new elements to his sensationally effective formula.
Child fans know that he has always found clever and amusing ways to suck his hero into a caper that Reacher isn’t really looking for.
In two recent novels, the hero is in the middle of enjoying — or looking for — a cup of coffee when something odd pushes him to find out what’s going on.
Reacher should know by now that trouble comes looking for him in the strangest guises.
The first scene in “Gone Tomorrow” ups the Reacher-interest ante in a way that he cannot possibly ignore. Sitting in an almost empty Lexington Ave. subway car heading uptown, very late one night, Reacher notices an ordinary-looking middle-aged white lady who is exhibiting extraordinarily weird behavior. Our protagonist starts registering the wrong notes emanating from this woman — she is wearing a very heavy coat in a very warm subway car and is murmuring or chanting to herself. Reacher quickly ticks off the close-to-airtight list of the 11 behavioral quirks that Israeli intelligence agents associate with a female suicide bomber.
Child somehow manages to sustain the novelty — and compulsive suspense — of the opening few chapters for more than 400 pages of escalating violence, black comedy and pointed observations on New York paranoia in the post-9/11 era. Toss in a sinister U.S. Senator, two horrifying female killers, and what might be a small army of al Qaeda operatives creeping through Union Square in the middle of the night and you’ve got a political thriller worthy of comparison with Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Melanie Adelman and Ellen Dvorkin have been friends since they were 12 years old and fixtures on the New York cabaret circuit for the past few years.
“Mel & El: This Show Rhymes” had a year-long engagement at the downtown club The Duplex.
A new show by the duo — “Mel & El: Show & Tell” — is running at Ars Nova in Manhattan through May 30; it’s an entertaining hybrid that combines elements of a free-wheeling (and sometimes raunchy) nightclub act with a more fully realized theater piece about friendship and nostalgia.
Mel & El play themselves in a garish pink room festooned with 1980s pop cultural memorabilia — everything from posters for John Hughes movies to pin-ups of Madonna and George Michael.
The premise of the show is that these two 30something women have invited friends over for a trip down memory lane and an examination of the ups and downs of female friendship. Ars Nova is such a cozy space that the illusion of a party for friends is easily sustained.
Mel is tall and blonde — and the more reserved of the two women.
El is a shorter, redhead firecracker in the Bette Midler vein who can keep us on her side even through the rudest of material — and some of her stuff is VERY rude — thanks to an infectious grin and an ever-present twinkle in her eyes.
Both of the women have crack comic timing that carries us over the weaker sections of the show.
“Show & Tell” is powered by some very catchy tunes by Patrick Spencer Bodd and a terrific four piece band made up of drummer Greg Joseph, bass/cello player Jordan Jancz, guitarist Sean Harkness and keyboard player Jasper Grant.
Mel and El display genuine musical comedy chops in the song sequences which climax with a hilarious mock hip hop number in which the friends finally get fed up with each other’s antics and start ripping each other to shreds.
You might be reminded of “Avenue Q” by the way that the bouncy tunes punch up Mel and El’s gags and give the show a sometimes weird vibe of kiddie TV for adults.
(Ars Nova is at 511 W. 54th St. For ticket information, go to arsnovanyc.com)

The “Foreign & Fringe” series that I’ve been co-hosting with Drew Taylor at the Fairfield Library wraps up tonight at 7 p.m. with a screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s breakthrough film, “The Conformist” (1970), which entranced audiences all over the world and put the Italian filmmaker in a position to get Marlon Brando to agree to do his follow-up movie, “Last Tango in Paris” two years later.
“The Conformist” influenced many American filmmakers during the 1970s, especially Francis Ford Coppola who brought a similar beautiful period style to “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) In the latter film, Coppola “quotes” a shot from the Bertolucci movie.
You can feel the influence of Bertolucci and cameraman Vittorio Storaro in “Chinatown” (1974) as well, in the way that the elegant production design and lighting in the Roman Polanski picture suggested 1930s Los Angeles.
Storaro’s lighting and composition for “The Conformist” were so striking that he was hired to shoot several Hollywood productions including two Coppola films (1979’s “Apocalypse Now” and the gorgeous 1982 flop, “One From the Heart”).
“The Conformist” is much more than a series of luscious visuals, however. It tells a very compelling story of the loyal Fascist assassin, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who finds himself in a moral quagmire when he is given the assignment to kill a man who was his professor in college.
Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, the title has more than one meaning. Clerici is conforming to the corrupt political values of his time, in part, as a way to cover-up his secret homosexuality. Marcello is married but in one key scene seems to be pushing his wife into the arms of the sultry young bride (Dominique Sanda) of the man he means to kill.
The film is subtle and enigmatic and rewards multiple viewings.
If you’ve never seen this great Italian film, join me at the library for tonight’s free showing.
(The Fairfield Library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center. For more information, go to www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org)

Filmmaker and dramatist Neil LaBute has suffered from a reputation as a raging misogynist because of pieces such as “In the Company of Men” and “Fat Pig,” in which women are treated very badly by men.
Many of those who attack LaBute fall into that terrible trap of assuming a writer is endorsing the behavior of his characters. (The same thing has happened to David Mamet with some of his blistering male-female dramas such as “Oleanna”).
I think LaBute has tried to examine sexism and that terrible macho gang mentality of men on their own talking about women. The writer holds a mirror up to contemporary male behavior and it is too much for some people.
LaBute has changed course a bit with his terrific Tony-nominated Broadway play, “reasons to be pretty,” in which we follow a young man named Greg (Thomas Sadoski, above) after he makes an unfortunate remark about the “regular” looks of his live-in girlfriend Steph (Marin Ireland, above).
Greg made the comment to his buddy Kent (Steven Pasquale) at a party where, unfortunately, Kent’s wife Carly (Piper Perabo) heard what was said and passed it along to her best friend, Steph.
“reasons to be pretty” opens with an explosive confrontation between Steph and Greg where he tries to explain what he meant by “regular” and she burns with rage about being publicly dissed by her boyfriend.
It’s always tricky to start a dramatic piece at such a fever pitch — LaBute and director Terry Kinney run the risk of hitting us with so much anger that we are turned off before we get to know who these people are.
But, Sadoski’s horrified reaction to Ireland’s tirade anchors us in the middle of a primal situation — everybody’s hope that they are seen as being “pretty” or “handsome” in the eyes of those who love them.
The play goes on to explore the two couples after Greg and Steph break up and we learn of the secret problems between Kent and Carly.
“I’ve written about a lot of men who are really little boys at heart, but Greg…just might be one of the few adults I’ve ever tackled,” LaBute wrote in the preface to the published version of the script.
“A boy grows up and becomes a man. I suppose every writer has one of those stories to tell, and this one is mine,” he adds.
“reasons to be pretty” doesn’t have what you could call an unalloyed “happy ending” but the emotional distance Greg travels from the first scene to the last is genuinely hopeful.