Cunningham, Boo, Taylor

Some General Observations

-How irritating Michael Cunningham's most recent novel is! This guy is in love with the sound of his own voice. If I went back and read "The Hours" again, would I love it as I loved it nine years ago? How lazy is it to include "and still, and yet" and other such wasteful bits of meaningless verbiage in your novel? A novel is a novel, not an e-mail. Choose your words with some care. And do you think, Mr. Cunningham, it's enough to make frequent, half-hearted allusions to Mizzy's greatness...do you think this is enough to establish that Mizzy is, in fact, great? Have you never taught a writing class? Have you never heard that old adage, "Show, don't tell"---? I don't believe in the character for a second. And since he is the hinge for your novel, this is a major problem. Lastly, I know that you're trying to channel Virginia Woolf, but I can't recall a Woolf passage as windy and self-indulgent as even the best page in "By Nightfall." (Maybe I'm wrong, though; maybe Woolf, like Cunningham, is overrated. Diana Athill certainly thinks that Woolf is overrated.)

-When I worked in publishing, I was very much interested in Katherine Boo and wanted her to write a book. Now, almost a decade has passed, and what do we get? "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." It has been heavily implied that this is the greatest non-fiction book about India since Orwell took on the topic many, many years ago. Can you imagine creating such a thing? ...Boo has some kind of illness that would lead many other people to give up on writing. She took some time off after high school, then went to Barnard, then found herself ascending the ranks of various publications, including "The New Yorker." She does not believe it is her job to make policy prescriptions; she simply tells the truth as carefully as possible, and hopes that perhaps someone in power will have the brief experience of understanding and empathizing with someone who is powerless (someone who is described in her book). Because of a MacArthur, Boo was able to get surgery on one hand; if she hadn't received this surgery, she may not have been able to continue writing. Boo has spent the last several years living in the slums of Mumbai, where she has earned the respect of the various people she has studied. She does not speak the languages of her subjects. She has written about their response to the sugary, offensive, irresponsible mess that was "Slumdog Millionaire." Her aim is to erase the word "I" from all of her reporting. The work is so intimate, so carefully observed, that you imagine you are reading a novel.

-Did you know that Elizabeth Taylor's first Oscar, for "Butterfield 8," was a sympathy Oscar? In other words, it's not that Taylor's work was amazing...Oscar voters simply felt bad for her because she was going through a rough time...Also, Taylor's big splash as an adult actor was "A Place in the Sun." I haven't seen this, and I'm eager to see it...Taylor had two Tennessee Williams hits: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly Last Summer." (Katherine Hepburn is in the latter...I can remember watching it in college. I would very much like to read about Hollywood depictions of homosexuality mid-century--and were audiences really aware of the things they were seeing when they were watching "Suddenly Last Summer"?) ...Anyway, I think Taylor's last triumph was "Who's Afraid of VW?" She won her second Oscar, and then things went wrong. She made bad movie after bad movie. She stopped getting offers. Can you imagine being Elizabeth Taylor--and struggling to get movie offers?