Slate Magazine - Dilettante, The

Jay McInerney's How It Ended.

Stephen Metcalf — Mon, 1 Jun 2009 06:56:20 EST

Some wines are oaky, some cough syrups mediciney; Jay McInerney's writing is zeitgeisty. "He laid out four identical lines with his Soho House membership card ..." begins a sentence that brought me up most short from his How It Ended: New and Collected Stories. This from the man recently compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald by the editor—a critic I otherwise revere—of the New York Times Book Review? Fitzgerald is a glory of the English language; McInerney is the John Marquand for a new American ruling class. His stories are populated by stockjobbers, star litigators, and the floating detritus of showbiz and the international rich—adepts in the competition that is a free agent society. They sense they are the victors and wear their sense of victory like an Elizabethan ruff. But the perimeter of the winner's circle is never fully secure. They long for what Marquand, the New England WASP, found confining; a small world, with its clubbiness and intimacy, to assert itself, finally, against the heartlessness and anonymity of the new power elitism. And it never does.

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What is it about Morrissey's voice that still breaks my heart?

Stephen Metcalf — Tue, 7 Apr 2009 06:40:13 EST

Morrissey has a new album, and fulfilling reviewerly protocol, Years of Refusal is nice listening, though if you don't already have Viva Hate, Your Arsenal, or the lovely Vauxhall and I, I wouldn't start your record collection here. Morrissey will always be—in excelsis mihi—Morrissey, but he is now also firmly middle-aged. The fake hearing aid and the pocketful of gladioli are long gone; the croon has audibly softened. (It has softened, truth be told, into a bit of a yodel.) Nonetheless, Years of Refusal is competent work, and its finest moments—"Shame Is the Name," "You Were Good in Your Time," and, for sheer Meat Loaf-quality lung work, "It's Not Your Birthday Anymore"—raise again the question that has vexed me since I first heard the Smiths 25 years ago. What is it about this man's voice that breaks my heart?

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Bruce Springsteen misreads the national mood in his halftime performance.

Stephen Metcalf — Mon, 2 Feb 2009 10:21:12 EST

"Is there anybody alive out there?" Bruce Springsteen blues-shouted to an audience of tens of millions of presumably catatonic football fans, by way of introducing a 12-minute medley of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" (fan favorite), "Born to Run" (signature anthem), "Working on a Dream" (Please Proceed to Checkout), and the obligatory and eternally unfun romp known as "Glory Days." Springsteen has evolved, in the 35 years I've adored him, from an acquired taste that almost no one acquired to America's favorite karaoke act. (Is it possible to enjoy Springsteen's music without fantasizing that you are Bruce Springsteen?) Having grown older with Springsteen, one would hardly begrudge him the need to play the Bridgestone Halftime Show at America's pseudo-event extraordinaire. It is, as he put it, a "promotional outlet" not to be denied.

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On the eve of Valkyrie, revisiting Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

Stephen Metcalf — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:42:48 EST

A worry shadows the forthcoming Tom Cruise thriller Valkyrie. The worry is that, upon seeing Cruise done up in an eye patch and Nazi jackboots—trick or treat!—audiences will laugh. This is not a high bar for the world's biggest movie star. Cruise is now 46 years old, roughly midcareer for an actor of his stature; and yet the brand has fallen so far that a throwaway summer goof, his cameo as Lev Grossman, the too-Jewish super producer of Tropic Thunder, was regarded as a "comeback." By way of contrast, when Jack Nicholson was 46, he appeared in Terms of Endearment. Nicholson's performance as retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove won him an Oscar, but more importantly, it permitted some humanity to rise up through accumulated strata of stock deviltry, and stand forth warmly. Cruise, meanwhile, gyrates in a fat suit.

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The Paul Newman scene I keep replaying in my head.

Stephen Metcalf — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:00:13 EST

Paul Newman was blessed with abnormally good looks and abnormally good scripts, but also something more: that magical quiddity that makes you celebrate someone for his strokes of good fortune. On the evidence of dozens of performances, he possessed no inclination to self-celebration, and so inspired no inclination to resentment. My two favorite stars, after the untouchable Cary Grant, are Newman and Nicholson. But if it's Jack's world and we just live in it, Newman always seemed happy to live in ours. He was inclined to "ordinary happiness," as a professor of mine once beautifully put it, or the prerogative of the celebrity to freely choose the parameters of normal human satisfaction. His channel to godliness paved by good looks, charisma, and infallible instinct in front of a camera, he nonetheless married long, loved well, and did good works. (If there is more to this story—aside from racing cars—then I don't want to know.) Who could begrudge him that twinkle? It was always on our behalf, never his.

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