The Last Days of Disco
Stillman, Whit
Whit Stillman, Novelist The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards Vc'hit Stillman Farrar, Straus & Giroux 339 pages / $z4 REVIEWED BY George Sim Johnston W f e all know...
...plays produced for obviously commercial purposes...
...Even more than the movie, the novel is a mixed report card on how the sexual revolution has changed the relations between the sexes...
...W hich is the central weakness of Command Performance: For all of her devotion to art--not to say her federal office in its service-- Jane Alexander has little idea what it constiThe American Spectator _9 October 200o 73...
...Tom DeLay's brain, she declares, "could fit in an eggcup as far as I could tell...
...They were, in fact, "the youngadult Wonder Years...
...I have never before read a "novelization" of a movie...
...When Charlotte's best friend Alice has an abrupt night of passion with the environmentalisblawyer Tom, the narrator's reflections are the perfect verbal counterpart of the bitter-sweet morning-after shot in the movie: How a young woman might feel leaving a man's house early in the morning after the first night of her first adult love affair seems to me totally mysterious and worth further study and understanding...
...With adroit dialogue, marvelous scene-painting and sharp character-sketching, Stillman has delivered an era that was not so long ago but seems to have sunk beneath the pavement like a lost Atlantis...
...Hollywood has made a hash of The Great Gatsby three times and wilt no doubt do so again...
...The characters are all searching for intimacy and often end in bed...
...In that moment, an entire world of WASP propriety and respect comes to grief...
...Maxine Waters, she is full of bile on the subject of Republicans and their friends in the press...
...Bumping into George Will in an elevator, she observes that his left arm is in a cast and thinks "all the while that if he had a cast on the other am~ also he might not be able to write...
...And fire reportage included the sufficiently complex and occasionally baffling interior lives of his subjects to make the movie satisfying on all counts...
...And there is Des, who is a wonderful creation...
...Another, Josh, works for the Manhattan district attorney and ends up busting the Club's owner for drugs and tax evasion...
...ghit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco worked beautifully on the screen...
...But the easily accessible acrobatics only seem to make the two sexes more puzzling to one another...
...And while she is full of admiration for such culture-ridden legislators as Sen...
...However that may be, the metamorphosis of The Last Days of Disco (the movie) into The Last Days of Disco (the book) is as miraculous and unexpected as an}4hing in Ovid...
...He would like to spend his life watching television and doing drugs and lands a job in the downtown club scene which is highly compatible with both pursuits...
...N Dame lane Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics Jane Alexartder PublicAffairs ~322pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian y ou may recognize Jane Alexander, the stage and TV actress who always looks as if she is posing for an equestrian statue--as the horse, of course...
...Nice hersdf has a properly old-fashioned Aunt on whom she tries to model herself, and there isa devastating scene toward the end when the aunt tearfully reveals to Nice over lunch how she has caught her supposedly wonderful husband in the act of adultery...
...It is as though the author had a burden of social knowledge that he could not fully discharge in one medium and so turned into a novelist to get the job fillly done...
...In the larger sense, however, she failed: The NEA budget shrank annually on her watch, and the value of the agency remains open to question...
...Minor errors aboundSen...
...She sees no difference, as it were, between John Singer Sargent and Sergeant Bilko...
...But what about a wonderful movie that is turned into a novel...
...Strong stuff-- especially from someone who refers to Americans living overseas as "ex-patriots," and writes a lazy, repetitive, self-indulgent book...
...The problem, of course, is that Miss Alexander's understanding of art is so broad, so credulous, and so amusingly haphazard that her critical faculties are largely confined to politics...
...Tom Wolfe once complained that the hippie subculture did not produce a single good novel...
...Three of them work for an old-fashioned publishing house that doesn't pay much but at least keeps lit their literary pilot lights...
...The narrator adds that "it's not as if we have so many decades that we can afford to go around trashing them for no very good reason...
...Like his 'avo previous films, Metropolitan and Barcelona, it gave the sort of pleasure one usually gets from a good foreign fihn...
...The Club is hard to get into, and Jimmy scores points with his employer by getting clients past the velvet rope...
...Those who take an interest in the arts, like the "gallant" Rep...
...Such passages (and there are many) marvelously capture the ambiguity of the new sexual freedoms...
...After the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, there was sentiment to abolish the arts endowment and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...She is furious that President Clinton seldom dropped what he was doing to discuss things with her at the White House...
...The narrator is rightly annoyed that the 198o's are always referred to as the Decade of Greed...
...There on the screen, without subtitles, were interesting people saying witty, literate things...
...We are at the tail end of the Studio 54 epoch...
...Sidney Yates, express their affection largely in fiscal terms: There is no evidence in Miss Alexander's account that Congressman Yates knows anything about art, but he knows what he likes, and he likes to spend public money...
...At the club, the real action is not on the dance floor but in the banquettes and unisex powder rooms, where a disarming set of characters engage in banter, pair off, break up, and generally go through the motions of this particular phase of the sexual revolution...
...Strangelove...
...From her standpoint, that was a vietory: She stood firm against barbarians in defense of art...
...Until now, the same could be said of Disco...
...reasons not entirely evident to Miss Alexander, whose recurrent theme is her estrangement from politics, both have survived to this day...
...fromance in the Age of Disco does not quite satisfy, there are the added flustrations of earning a living in a city which has not yet discovered leveraged buy- o 72 O c t o/9 e r 2 o o o . The American Spectator outs, let alone entered cyberspace...
...Or, on the other hand, would she feel vulnerable and exposed, in a strategically weakened position with the man involved, and perhaps open to criticism for having moved "too quickly" and acted in a way that, from the outside in the eyes of the critical and moralistic, might have even seemed a little bit "slutty...
...Ted Kennedy, "the finest politician of them all," and the "thoughtful" Rep...
...Yes, there is a double standard here...
...Jane Alexander left Washington deeply embittered, and in Command Performance, her memoir as "an actress in the theater of politics," she settles innumerable scores...
...The story is told by Jimmy Steinway, who works for an ad agency in New York, but whose real emotional life is among friends who gather at what is referred to only as "the Club...
...He manages this because of his friendship with Des, a morally conflicted contemporary who helps run the place...
...Jimmy and his male friends want the quick revelations of an affair, but also seem to agree with Henry James that the most appealing women are those possessing both "mystery and manners...
...David Boren, D-Okla., is identified as "another Republican but a great arts supporter"--and Command Performance is clogged with irrelevant detail: The entire text of her oath of office is reprinted, for example, and readers are kept abreast of her children's careers...
...But for PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...Mediocre novels present no such problem...
...The problem is that when screenwriters and directors try to re-create the literary pleasures of a good book, they breathe into the movie a soul made of paper and ink rather than celluloid...
...and so achieves the most vocational satisfaction...
...Not even a rivulet of tepid prose issued from the typewriters of acid freaks...
...Stillman gives us a marvelous po~ait of a group of intelligent and sensitive people improvising their third decades in the job market...
...He has spent his professional life waiting for a climactic moment when he could say, "Book this clown...
...Men have gotten very, very weird...
...If Stillman's movies remind yon of a European art film that is actually fun, this novei puts one in the mind of the good old days of elegant social fiction --of Wharton and Fitzgerald, Marquand and Cheerer...
...Rep...
...Everyone who went to college in the early seventies knows him...
...Between 1993 and 1997 she took a detour from show business to serve as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and while her tenure at the NEA was not her greatest performance, it was not entirely a failure, either...
...Dickens and Thackeray would have had no complaints about the abundant novelistic material available on the dance floors of Studio, Heartbreak, and all those raffish music holes south of 14th Street...
...It is a good thing that Red Alert was a forgettable paperback original, or we would not have Dr...
...It's one of the aspects of the sexual revolution they don't like to talk about," says the tart, marvelously drawn Charlotte...
...Now he has turned The Last Days of Disco into a novel...
...So, a simple rule will spare you the screen versions of The Bonfire of the Vanities and Snow Falling on Cedars: Love the book, skip the movie...
...Speaker Newt Gingrich "was in charge of an unruly mob of firebrands out for total revolution...
...She complains, with a straight face, that the United States "is unique in the world in funding the arts with only ten percent of public money and ninety percent private money...
...So far as he is concerned, the early 198o's were a time of hard work and maximum productivity...
...Would she feel completely happy, joyous at having finally found someone and having that passion so quickly reciprocated, physically and emotionally fulfilled, perhaps even with the triumph of conquest and of having her femininity, skill and allure confirmed...
...This being a Stillmanesque production, it is no surprise to discover at the end that this highly talkative bunch have been secretly maturing into solid bourgeoisie all along...
...Stilhnan, in fact, achieved something novelists are supposed to do, but don't anymore: He gave us rich reportage about a fascinating social miiieu--the inflamed disco culture of the early eighties as experienced by a group of post-collegiate settlers on the island of Manhattan...
...Whit Stillman, Novelist The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards Vc'hit Stillman Farrar, Straus & Giroux 339 pages / $z4 REVIEWED BY George Sim Johnston W f e all know that great novels often make bad movies...
...She lived in Washington during the 196o's and 7o's, but is surprised to learn that most members of Congress have little interest in aesthetics, or harbor middlebrow tastes...
...When Jane Alexander marshals artists to lobby for her agency, they are generally artists of problematic stature: Michael Bolton, Kenny G, Jon Secada, Melanie Griffith...
...As a result, they gravitate toward the incorrigibly demure Alice (played by Chloe Sevigny in the film, who soon went on to fame and fortune...
...When she tires of laughing at adversaries less sophisticated than members of the Alexander family (her husband is producer of TV's "Law and Order"), she pads out her book with three incessant themes: her immersion in the stage, her lifelong devotion to left-wing political causes, and her passionate belief in the healing power of Art...
...I assume that the majority are inexpertly padded screenGEORGE SIN JOHNSTON iS a freelance writer living in New York...
Vol. 33 • October 2000 • No. 8
