After the Glitter Fades
KAMINE, MARK
After the Glitter Fades The Silver Screen By Maureen Howard Viking. 244 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Mark Kamine Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement," the...
...As much satisfaction can be derived from the appreciation of careful construction, rhythm, sound, or clever wordplay as from the more conventional pleasures of drama and suspense...
...The occasion is the funeral of Isabel Maher, known as Bel, a former star of silent movies who has lived most of her life in Rhode Island in a house overlooking Narragansett Bay...
...In another scene Rita meets Manny, at this point her future husband, at the deathbed of his first wife...
...She proves unreachable because Manny, an ex-mobster, is in the witness protection program...
...Rita's dropping out of Joe's life torments him...
...Nevertheless, those effects are often quite pleasing...
...Without drama rooted in realism to animate it, where this novel is shaky Howard's surplus of style is a surface glitter that keeps us at a slight, if admiring, distance...
...In one instance, Manny's daughter fails to pull a knife from a bag and instead ends up politely drinking coffee with her father and Rita, whom just moments before she was on the verge of attacking...
...We hear directly from Bel, who speaks from the grave of her family and her fleeting fame...
...Years later Joe will pay a visit to Arrowhead, Herman Melville's house, and Joe's thoughts there are of his mother and of childhood...
...The effortlessly modulated chunk of back story covers half a century of the protagonist's history without a false note...
...Howard sprinkles the elegantly meandering sentences that channel Bel's voice with old-fashioned idioms and staccato rhythms...
...Joe's path to the priesthood can hardly be called a calling: Bel seems to have selected it for him...
...Reviewed by Mark Kamine Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement," the "Believer" The first three volumes of Maureen Howard's series of seasonal fictions—the winter novel A Lover's Almanac (1999...
...The moderns were embarked on a mission to deepen literary realism...
...She screen-tests for the talkies but then leaves to start a family...
...Louise and Artie reappear in Big As Life, three novellas that also feature the historical figures Lucy and John James Audubon and inventions like Mae O'Connor, Artie's Irish patrician grandmother, who (along with a handful of others) makes appearances in all three books...
...as well as in the nuanced repetitions and variations among her sentences, and the subordinations and syntactical inversions within them...
...Bel on a sightseeing trip with Joe, Rita and Gemma...
...Roman Catholicism is a cornerstone of The Silver Screen, too...
...Howard tells their story through a kaleidoscopic array of voices...
...and from Gemma, a photographer who is, like A Lover's Almanac's painter heroine, "somewhat famous...
...Bel's children, high school age, during a memorable moment...
...The characters tend to view both trivial and crucial moments in their lives through a prism of death...
...and her new summer novel The Silver Screen— are the work of a superb writer...
...Efforts to enlist the aid of his son and daughter similarly prove fruitless...
...This tale told out of chronological sequence starts near the end of Bel's acting career, loops back to her Connecticut childhood and the tinkering of her watchmaker father, then slides forward to her schoolgirl theatricals and her courting by Tim Murphy, a hero of World War I. The courtship is interrupted when Bel is discovered by a touring vaudevillian and takes off for Hollywood...
...The Silver Screen, for all its skillful ventriloquism and flourishes of language, is further diminished by a tendency to disregard dramatic tension...
...The Silver Screen is also replete with references to the underworld...
...Big as Life (2002), a collection of shorter spring fictions...
...Bel first realizes her dramatic talent while reciting Edgar Allan Poe in "the cadences of my mother's voice...
...from Joe, a priest and teacher who dwells on his childhood and youth...
...It tells of painter Louise Moffett's offand-on affair with computer geek Artie Silverman, and of the parallel romance between Artie's affluent grandfather and a long-lost love...
...The narration, rendered in intensely internal monologues, roves among the principal characters and key family members, straying off into history in a few instances...
...With her children and Gemma she visits the chapel from MobyDick, where she reads aloud from the novel...
...Rita's husband is compared to Pluto—"Pluto, god of death...
...She becomes a big reader, preferring books to scripts—reason enough to abandon Hollywood, it seems...
...in her allusions to mythology, literature and history...
...Howard's writerliness is on display in her frequently alliterative, always musical ear...
...Howard is concerned with literature's ability to connect us to the past, viscerally as well as intellectually...
...In Mexico negotiating her future in 1928, Bel comes into possession of a toy skeleton in a disturbing scene on the Mexican Day of the Dead...
...Here is posthumous Bel recalling for Gemma the beginning of her last Hollywood affair, with Meyer Wolf, the writer of the final movie she was to work on: "I once told you Hollywood stories, censored for a curious girl, bootleg booze and cut-rate jazz, the beaded blue chiffon for the Photoplay interview, satin for Silver Screen to play against the curved Art Deco walls favored by MGM, the Production Code that ordered movie husbands and wives to sleep in separate beds while it was custom to bed down in Tinseltown—production to production, but gosh, I'm working-class if it pleases Meyer Wolf, who follows me to my room in the bungalow when Lotte goes off to a party with her German director...
...Yet we always know who is talking, what the angle is, and where we are in time...
...they are embittered by their father's betrayal of both their mother and his old way of life...
...She returns East just as abruptly, marries Murphy, and settles into life as a former film star, now housewife and mother...
...Is it fair to paste that on Manny...
...Though spiced by alluring peeks into movie-making's past and a handful of beguiling minor characters—among them a lovelorn model and a fashion photographer with the preening narcissism of a 1930s screwball comedy artiste—The Silver Screen doesn't add up...
...Brief italicized third-person passages recountpast adventures: Bel on movie sets...
...Yet he is a compelling character, caring and compassionate but not beyond lapses of selfishness or deceit...
...What they left behind now seems less true to life than writerly in the extreme: exceptional, attentiongrabbing, overly self-conscious in the use of language and truncated or unpunctuated syntax...
...Alas, that is a thin line to hang a novel on...
...The vague details we learn of his life— drinking, abrief but fondly and frequently remembered affair, his doubts about the afterlife—do not suggest firm conviction...
...Her children Joe and Rita, and an old family friend named Gemma—all in their late 60s and 70s—have come together for the burial...
...Some sections of the book are narrated from the perspectives of Rita, her new husband Manny, and his sister Mimi...
...A Lover's Almanac, the most engaging book (so far) of the seasonal series, is set largely in Manhattan in the winter of 2000...
...The modernists prized such writerliness, as we know from the frequent use of interior monologues in the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner...
...Melville's fate as a questing writer doomed to long silence after early success mirrors Bel's broken-off career, and Howard's subtle but persistent mythologizing echoes his work...
...Howard alludes to the Church's recent sex scandals (we meet a "doctor, confessor to priests who damage little boys") and its shrinking presence in contemporary society (the seminary Joe attended has become "an upscale center for yoga...
...Gemma attributes her devotion to art to her early acquaintance with the former star: "I believe it was Bel's commanding silence, on screen and off, her refusal to answer, that set me to photography, my life's work...
...By all accounts Bel's is an inspiring presence...
...Perhaps the fourth of Howard's Seasons tetralogy will pull it all together, lending lulls in The Silver Screen unforeseen resonance...
...His anger at his sister's quick departure from home after Bel's death gives rise to the novel's single conventional plot device: Joe's regret spurs him to attempt to track down Rita...
...Many others (John Updike for one) have employed the technique with mixed results...
...Howard's narrative skill is most apparent, though, when she describes Bel's path toward and return from Hollywood...
...The Silver Screen, not quite equal to its predecessors, is set principally in summertime but takes up the wintry themes of age and memory...
...She belongs to the category of artists whose style calls attention to itself to an unusual degree...
Vol. 87 • July 2004 • No. 4
