The Climate Abroad
KAMINE, MARK
The Climate Abroad The Weather in Berlin By Ward Just Houghton Mifflin. 305 pp. $24.00. Prague By Arthur Phillips Random. 384 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Mark Kamine Short story writer;...
...Here is Greenwood, during prep for filming, imagining how Summer, 1921's male protagonist would react to the sight of a massive World War I graveyard: "Wendt, the irreverent one, would probably light a match on the concrete and then pose for aphotograph, a cigarette in his mouth and his boot on the Gothic cross, thinking no doubt of—the girls in the Citroën, a pebble in his shoe, the high whistle of a French .75, the pure arc of a Matisse brush stroke, or the beer and sausage in the rear of the van...
...Increasingly, Dixon's reminiscences center on the making of his chef-d'oeuvre, Summer, 1921...
...the trip is no less an occasion for Greenwood to revisit his personal history than for him to find a viable future: "Something about [Berlin] encouraged repose...
...he made his most successful film there, and his father interrogated Nazis in Berlin itself following World War II...
...Although it went against the Hollywood grain, the film was a critical and commercial triumph, garnering a legion of youthful fans plus an Oscar...
...the flings with actresses...
...The reverie jars Greenwood into remembering an auto accident, which shifts his thoughts to a meeting before the accident, and so on...
...Or when you encounter this description of Charles sitting in a hospital hallway: "To his side, between his shoulder and the door frame of Imre's room, a mop sprouted out of a stained white plastic bucket and rested against the tiles, peering nonchalantly over Charles' shoulder, occasionally sliding coquettishly along the wall into him...
...Emily Oliver, a Midwesterner who works at the U.S...
...As the book opens, in fact, she is preparing to shoot a movie with their old friend Howard Goodman, a director whose pictures Dixon dismisses for being "at a certain level"—meaning "box-office entertainment that did not embarrass anyone...
...Unless you were one of them...
...There are some lastminute surprises, but unfortunately they point up how little drama we have encountered...
...John Price, the most recent arrival, emerges as the book's central figure...
...At a jazz club John befriends a mysterious older woman, a Hungarian version of the kind of character Marlene Dietrich made famous, who entices him with stories of Europe's decadent past...
...This affords the author ample opportunity to reflect on creativity, storytelling and the relation of art to reality: The critics "did not understand that every creative endeavor was an act of rebellion against that which had gone before...
...So he had turned on the radio and stretched out on the long couch and closed his eyes, thinking of the girl who danced barefoot on a lawn in Winnetka and the North Shore dissolving into a street in Vienna and the dream that hovered over him...
...Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion (glancingly, in Play It As It Lays) have managed to convey in satisfying narratives the desperation, preening, egocentrism, bombast, and sheer ridiculousness of many Hollywood types...
...Just is also expert at showing Americans in the harsh light of foreign perception, as when Greenwood recollects a visit to Ireland: "He remembered the general air of pinched embarrassment, people making do with too little (or less than they thought they were owed), leading to resentment of Americans, people who had too much for their own good and certainly much, much more than they deserved...
...Finally, the producer offers Greenwood the chance to direct an episode, and eventually he accepts...
...Only Charles gets what he wanted—a plum business deal made at the expense of an aging, magisterial heir to an ancient Hungarian publishing house...
...We bring a sense of expectancy and hope to first novels, similar to that of Phillips' cast of characters...
...Phillips effectively sets the scene in newly opened Eastern Europe: "Budapest —just six months earlier an unlikely tourist attraction—began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making, or to cash in on a market in turmoil, or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a Cold War-torn city, or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic, though one sensed such a potent license would expire far too soon...
...Prague contains some broadly humorous scenes, like John negotiating for his first Budapest apartment, and the gang steering a travel writer down all the wrong paths to protect the city's hippest spots...
...Through such associative leaps, Just limns his hero's life: the charming, prodigal father...
...Germany has resonance for him...
...Claire responds pointedly: "Sarcasm does not become you, Dixon...
...She agrees, however, that Berlin might...
...in pursuit of the expatriate's dream: fresh experience, inside knowledge, and a tight-knit group with which to share the special intensity of life abroad...
...novelist...
...Directors may invoke Truffaut, Francisco Goya, Gustav Mahler, and Henri Matisse, as Just's protagonist does, yet they are as liable to discuss Porsches and vacation homes...
...What is apparently meant to be a new shot (a new camera setup) is instead termed a "last take" (another version of an already-set shot...
...Americans have always hated us," Baz herself remarks...
...The group falls apart...
...Just neatly shifts from present to past, and back again, though...
...Thus we are informed that the three young women who starred in Summer, 1921 were discovered by Dixon and his cameraman at a café, precisely the way they are discovered by the men in the film...
...They take him on an excursion into East Germany, where he encounters Baz' aunt and her bitter, war-damaged uncle...
...and the surprisingly enduring marriage...
...A character study set and shot in Germany, it told the story of three young artists and their summer romances...
...The last half of the novel follows Greenwood's interactions with this German TV crowd...
...Arthur Phillips' debut novel is about Americans on a more extended stay in Europe than Dixon Greenwood...
...He is tempted to accept...
...Living in a foreign country for a while provides an opportunity to discover and review...
...Another old friend has offered her husband a fellowship at Mommsen House, an American think tank in the suburb of Wannsee...
...Greenwood sees himself as an artist, and at various moments expresses admiration for the French auteur François Truffala...
...It is disorienting, then invigorating...
...Books like In the City of Fear, Jack Gance and Echo House speak with impressive authority about the inner lives of statesmen whose real-life counterparts strive to conceal any hint of ambivalence or uncertainty...
...The novel darkens, and loses its focus, as it proceeds...
...Wendt's persona is all there—artistic ambition, lust, self-regard, the memory of war...
...Jana's mysterious disappearance provides one of the few dramatic episodes in this meditative and ultimately somewhat sluggish novel...
...When Jana, the female lead, dove into a lake late in the shoot and did not resurface—a scene re-created in flashback—the cameraman caught this in real time...
...He visits the set of their program, entitled Wannsee 1899...
...Phillips' premise is promising, but the story soon begins to drag and the droll prose starts to feel clumsy and overworked...
...He falls in love with Emily, forms a close relationship with Charles, becomes Mark's indulgent friend, and attempts a reconciliation with estranged brother Scott...
...Most of the book's action takes place during Greenwood's three-month stay in Germany...
...There is also an excess of generic movie talk here—"the soundman would have to know his business, recording each conversation, and separately the ambient sound...
...But there is a good deal to admire, as always, in Just's prose...
...contributor, "Laurel Review," "Massachusetts Review" Ward Just, an ex-journalist with an insider's awareness of our career politicians' ways, is probably best known as the Washington, D.C...
...The quintet consists of John and Scott Price, two always battling brothers from California...
...The Weather in Berlin is not one of Just's finer achievements, but it does skillfully render the climate for Americans overseas...
...and Mark Payton, a Canadian scholar doing postdoctoral research for a book on the history of nostalgia...
...He has produced fiction and nonfiction about Vietnam, and The Weather in Berlin is his fourth novel about Americans in Europe...
...An occasionally coquettish mop, however, is not the way to lure us to the end of a book as long as this one...
...He draws his characters with great economy, relying on flashes of insight rather than exhaustive physical description...
...the early success in Hollywood...
...Most writers, though, get seduced by Hollywood in spite of themselves, and in large and small ways get it wrong...
...Still, Just excels at evoking the risk and exhilaration and tedium of being an American abroad...
...Scott marries a native and leaves Budapest, and his brother, permanently behind...
...Emily finally embraces her lesbianism and skips town following a stormy romance with an expat artist John is also sleeping with...
...Embassy...
...Its principal characters are introduced in the arch tone that marks contemporary fiction: "Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized café table: a moment of total insignificance, and not without a powerful whiff of clich...
...They did not understand that Truffaut's great task in The Four Hundred Blows was not to make the boy into himself but to make himself into the boy, not autobiography but anti-autobiography....' Just explores the gap between life and art throughout...
...The women were not actresses, and their actual identities and film personas were largely merged in the making of the movie...
...is a bad town when you're not working," he tells his wife...
...Its protagonist, 64-year-old Dixon (Dix) Greenwood, is a film director who had a few hits 30 years ago and has since managed to live well on the fringes of the Hollywood community...
...Then there is a more revealing reason: "L.A...
...a banker from Ohio with Hungarian roots named Charles Gâbor...
...Just is not an exception...
...But Just has a couple of subspecialties as well...
...When Willa Baz, a German TV producer, and her coterie befriend Greenwood, there is a push and pull between their respect for his movies and their discomfort with his nationality: "The Americans are hypocrites," one of them says...
...It positions him for his initial romantic affairs, and enables him to help Charles get his biggest business deal off the ground...
...Prague, despite its title, takes place in Budapest a year after the fall of Communism...
...By contrast, his longtime actress wife, Claire, has kept her career going...
...And there are some questionable details: The crew and actors are "sprawled in chairs or on the floor" after a director calls "cut," when they would more ikely be at their busiest preparing for the next scene...
...John's job as a columnist at an Englishlanguage daily brings him into contact with a cross section of locals and newcomers...
...Mark has a nostalgia-induced breakdown...
...The institute hosting Greenwood is located in Wannsee, after all, site of the infamous conference where the Nazis codified their anti-Semitic policies...
...John, undeterred, sets off alone for an unnamed city (Prague...
...You know you are in trouble when melting snow becomes "the snow that had been winning its release toward waterhood...
...The interplay between foreignness and belonging is a recurring motif...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
