Girl Detective

I will lead a discussion next week of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and just finished re-reading it. This was my third time through, and I like it better each time (2005, and in 2007).

Gilead is narrated by John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist minister in small-town Iowa during the 1950’s. Ames married late in life, and has a seven-year-old son to whom he’s writing a series of letters for when he’s gone. In them, he describes his family, including his father and grandfather, both preachers, though of very different approaches. The family history is tied to the town of Gilead, and its past of racial unrest. During the writing of his letters, Ames is disturbed by the return to town of his godson and namesake, John Ames Boughton, called Jack.

He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved.

Ames experiences jealousy, anger and fear as he struggles to understand the complicated relationship between this young man (the son of Ames’ best friend) and himself. Themes of mortality, religion, prejudice, relationships and belief underpin the book, all told in Robinson’s clear, beautiful prose. Ames can be a slippery narrator, though, often writing one thing when the truth lies clearly elsewhere. In interviews about the book, Robinson has said the conflicting Biblical stories of Gilead intrigued her. The phrase “balm of Gilead” refers to something made from a native healing plant, yet a possible translation of Gilead is “rocky area.” Robinson carries this disparity through in the book, urging the reader to realize multiple, often conflicting truths.

The book barely acknowledges World War II and the Holocaust, though it’s set in 1956 America. Further, much is made of the suffering of fathers and sons, but little of daughters and their mothers. I suspect these are deliberate omissions, though, examples of the complicated nature of Gilead and John Ames.

Thoughtful and meditative, this is a book to savor, not gobble, and especially poignant in its consideration of the many complications in father/son relationships.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

This week my younger son, Guppy, turned 5. He is, as I often tell him, a joy and a wonder. He is strong, sturdy, and independent.

Last summer he rode a bike with training wheels, and this summer we’ll try to take them off, and see what happens.

He learned to read this past year, though he often insists if I ask him what something says, “I can’t _read!_” (like the dog in the Snausages commercial).

He went through a “tagging” phase recently, where he wrote his name on things all over the house. Including my library book.

I’m often told he has a very cute speaking voice. His Ls and Rs are still a bit unclear; he tends to roll them, and the effect is sweet and funny, especially on names like Star Wars villain General Grievous. Obi-Wan is pronounced Obi-One, and Darth’s second name is Vater, but I’m sure these will be corrected in all good time.

For his birthday, he got a remote-controlled Hail Fire Droid ship with 18 working missiles, that he promptly figured out how to fire. At his older brother Drake. (It sounds more like Hellfire Droid when he says it, and I’m not sure that’s too far off.)

Like Drake (and because of him, I’m sure) Guppy loves comic books (though he insists he doesn’t like going to the comic shop), television, and video games (especially the Star Wars Lego ones). He is often sweet and affectionate, and is generous with his hugs. He is very much looking forward to day camp this summer, and kindergarten in the fall.

And readers, so am I. I love Guppy, but I also love having time apart from Guppy, and I’ll be interested to see how his individuality grows as he moves further out into the world.

This quote is from Gilead, which I re-read this week, and it reminded me very much of the many fleeting moments I’ll look at Guppy (and Drake, and my husband) and feel so very fortunate, or, in the language of Gilead, blessed:

Your existence is a delight to us.

Emma Donoghue’s Room arrived to much hoopla last fall. This was largely due to its explosive subject matter, a mother raising her now-five-year-old son in a small room. The boy, Jack, knows nothing of the outside world, and narrates the book.

Here’s what I can say without spoilers: this is a powerful book about a mother and son. The author, for the most part, pulls off the tricky feat of the five-year-old narrator. This is not a happy-sunshine book, but neither is it apocalyptic doom. It’s provocative and well worth reading not only for its many merits, but also to talk about it later. Those who might want to avoid it are readers averse to stories with deadbeat fathers, child-in-danger motifs, or violence/rape of women, though these last were not graphic.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

***

Seriously, spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t read it. You don’t want to know.

I was amazed by the powerful narrative of the beginning of the book, and impressed with the slow accretion of facts filling in the background of the little boy and his mother, Ma, and how they came to be in Room. I loved the proper naming of everything in their tiny space, like Bed, Toilet, and Meltedy Spoon. I was impressed by the energy and ingenuity of Ma and the many ways she invented to raise Jack in isolation. For the first half, I felt compelled to read the book. It had a very high must-know-what-happens quotient. I was also impressed by how the author raised anxiety to a breaking point in me as a reader, then changed the setting to the outside world. I could feel what Jack and Ma were feeling throughout, and other characters as well. The psychology and motivations are very well done even if often squirm-inducingly uncomfortable.

The second half of the book, in the outside world, wasn’t as compelling to me as the first for several reasons. One, Jack’s voice wasn’t as consistently believable as a young boy:

That helicopter was full of paparazzi trying to steal pictures of me and Ma.

Two, everyone from the outside was either continually insensitive (Ma’s mother, father, and brother’s family, Noreen the nurse, the Oprah-ish character, i.e. most people) or not (Officer Oh, Dr. Clay, Steppa Leo). There wasn’t a lot of variation in the way people reacted, even if I did clearly understand why some of them were being insensitive and often even empathized with them.

Three, the end of the novel became too overtly didactic at points, for example criticizing those who are uncomfortable with breastfeeding, and most parents for how they care for their children.

What was to be four, but has changed even in the writing of this, was that I found Ma without enough complexity. For the most part, she was a perfect mother, raising her child skillfully even in spite of the insane circumstances. Once outside, she continued to be a strong, vocal character, wavering little, and making sense in the face of many people’s nonsensical behavior. However, while I did understand her choice to keep the outside world from Jack until he was five, I had a very hard time with her cajoling him in the escape attempts. In the second half, many readers didn’t believe she would attempt suicide, leaving Jack on his own. I initially felt the same, but after reflection felt the opposite. Suicide is not a rational, balanced decision. It is, for most, a strong impulse to stop the pain, which Ma had in abundance. I easily believe her pain and PTSD could have overwhelmed her protectiveness of Jack, especially now that she was away from her captor and in a safe environment with Dr. Clay and Noreen on the inside, and her mother and brother on the outside. So while initially Ma struck me as not complex enough, I changed my mind.

In the end, I recommend this book. Its many strengths far outweigh the few criticisms I had, and I suspect the characters will stay with me for some time.

For two other reviews I liked see Aimee Bender’s at the New York Times and one from the Entertainment Weekly blog.

Depending on how the author writes, I can either loathe the mention of food in books, or be so enamored of it that I get hungry and promptly want what’s being described.

Two series in which the many food references didn’t work for me were in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series, beginning serialization on HBO this month with A Game of Thrones. In the Larsson books, I lost count of how many sandwiches, cups of coffee, and frozen Billy’s pizza were consumed. None of them sounded appetizing. Only dull and repetitive.

Ditto the food in the Song of Fire and Ice books. The food, along with what characters were wearing, was described so many times, and in such unnecessary detail, that I gave up partway through the third book, and am now afraid to pick up the series again as many fans fear Martin is going to die before he finishes the fifth book, which isn’t even the last in the series. And while the food, sauces and serving styles were repeated ad nauseum, vegetables are pretty much nowhere, something I noticed after reading Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasy Books. Meat: yes! Fruit: sometimes. Vegetables or salad? No way.

Two recent books had me salivating, though. Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books, especially The Likeness, mentioned so many types of biscuits (cookies) so often that I now have both ginger lemon and chocolate cream in the house. Hollis Henry’s description of broasted potatoes from William Gibson’s Spook Country made me long for them. Hubertus Bigend in Zero History recommends The Full English breakfast a few times, so I ate baked beans with my eggs and toast all last week and am considering whether I want to go to Anchor Fish and Chips for the Full Whack. (Yes, you can get a Full Irish in Minneapolis!)

What food in what recent books has made you hungry, or horrified?

The third in Gibson’s “Bigend” trilogy, Zero History brings back two of the three main characters from Spook Country, Milgrim and Hollis. Milgrim is now working for Bigend, and Hollis reluctantly drawn back into doing same.

She was starting her second cup, Times unread, when she saw Hubertus Bigend mount the stairhead, down the full length of the long room, wrapped in a wide, putty-colored trench coat.

He was the ultimate if velour-robe types, and might just as well have been wearing one now as he swept toward her through the drawing room, unknotting the coat’s belt as he came, pawing back its Crimean lapels, and revealing the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen. He somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, if if he grew somehow closer.

Both Milgrim and Hollis are, improbably, on the trail of… wait for it…

pants. Milgrim is trying to find a prototype of a good military pant, while Hollis is recruited to track down something known as a secret brand. Tying together the marketing and fashion aspects from Pattern Recognition and the spy/spook elements from Spook Country, Zero History brings in old characters and weaves them in with new. It is not easily identifiable by genre, though Gibson is traditionally shelved in Science Fiction. There’s mystery, thriller, and even romance. This book, like its predecessors, was plain fun to read and had a huge amount of “I want to know what happens next” charisma, which carried me swiftly along, with short chapters and alternating viewpoints.

After finishing, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Gibson from the current print edition of Rain Taxi. And I look forward to spelunking through his previous works.

I get a lovely feeling in my heart when I’m sitting in a dark theater, munching popcorn, watching a movie while my kids laugh beside me–doing something I love, and sharing it with them. I have a much less warm feeling after the movie is over, and they make faces and say they hated the movie.

I don’t take my kids to every kid movie that comes out. I take them to a few a year that trusted critics and other parents have recommended. Yet again and again, they seem to be engaged, laughing, enjoying and wham, by the time we’re out the door, they are grumpy: How to Train Your Dragon (which they said they didn’t like, but agreed to see again), Fantastic Mr. Fox, Princess and the Frog, Up, Secret of the Kells, Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, Megamind, and now Tangled.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Tangled, either, though. Look, it’s a pretty blond princess who’s been kidnapped by a witch with kinky black hair! Look, an older rascal who is tamed by the virginal princess into a good man! The major building blocks of the movie were dry as dust, with uncomfortable racist and sexist undertones. Really, the whole plot is that of the standard bodice ripper that clearly no one at Disney has taken the time to interrogate enough, if at all.

Here’s what I liked: Pascal the chameleon was great. The name of the thugs’ bar is The Snuggly Duckling. I think that’s it. My boys liked Pascal, and they liked the parts with physical humor. That was about it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my boys and movies. About the only movies I can get them to approve of are most Pixar flicks, most Miyazaki flicks, and Mary Poppins. Oh, yeah. And the Star Wars movies. I’m going to keep trying, though. But clearly, modern kids’ movies don’t seem to be the way to go.

I always found my family’s banana bread recipe difficult to make. The baking time way exceeded the suggested hour, which seemed par for other recipes, too. Further, it often came out super dense and almost wet rather than moist, probably a result of including the liquid from the bottle of maraschino cherries. Later in life I fiddled with it, combining it with a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated with good results. Only recently, though, did it occur to me to try the original ingredients with CI’s method. I did this yesterday, and am happy to report success. Here, then, is my family’s recipe, minus extraneous liquid (the cherry juice and a Tablespoon of water to mix the baking soda in), with some whole-wheat flour replacing some of the AP flour, and using the Cook’s Illustrated method. In a perfect world, I’d freeze some, make either of the other recipes (original or combo) next and compare. That, though, would depend on me being able to leave any of this uneaten. Unlikely.

Great-Grandmother Jenny’s Banana Bread with Maraschino Cherries
(makes one standard loaf pan, or 3 mini loaves) If your bananas aren’t ripe enough, peel them and put them on a cookie sheet in the oven while it preheats. Remove them, let them cool, then mash and include them.

Ingredients:

4/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup (8 tablespoons, or 1 stick) butter, melted then cooled
2 large eggs, beaten lightly
3 very ripe bananas, mashed well (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 10-ounce bottle maraschino cherries, drained, rinsed, stems removed, each ripped or cut in halves or thirds

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour one standard loaf pan, or three mini loaf pans. Melt butter in microwave or over low heat on stovetop. Set aside to cool.

2. In medium-large bowl, mix or sift together flours, sugar, salt and soda.

3. Check that butter has cooled, or it will cook the eggs. In medium bowl, mix together melted butter, eggs, mashed bananas and cherries.

4. Lightly fold wet mixture into dry with rubber spatula until just combined. Batter should be chunky with no flour streaks.

5. Scrape batter into loaf pan(s). Bake until golden brown, and tester comes out clean, about 55 minutes for standard loaf, about 40 minutes for mini loaves. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature. Store in an airtight container.

Spook Country, the 2nd in William Gibson’s “Bigend” trilogy, includes only one character (Hubertus Bigend himself) from and the briefest mention of Pattern Recognition, the first book in the series, so it could easily be read on its own or in reverse order.

Spook Country is told from three viewpoints: Hollis Henry, the former lead singer of a popular broken-up band; Tito, whose mysterious family ties are a mix of Cuban, Chinese and Russian. And Milgrim, a Russian translator addicted to Atavan kidnapped by some vaguely militaristic guy named Brown. All are mixed up in some way with covert intelligence and virtual reality locators on the GPS grid.

“Rausch,” said the voiced in Hollis Henry’s cell. “Node,” it said

She turned on the bedside lamp, illuminating the previous evening’s empty can of Asahi Draft, from the Pink Dot, and her sticker-encrusted PowerBook, closed and sleeping. She envied it.

***

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

***

Milgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat he’d stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli, watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of key’s taken from a small transparent Ziploc bag, exactly the sort of bag that Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s East Village dealer, used to package crystal.

As in Pattern Recognition, Gibson writes breezily about global business and emerging technologies, adding political fallout from 9/11 this book to make a headier mix. All three characters are engaging and sympathetic. Bigend’s motivations, and his behind-the-scenes manipulations, are as mysterious as they were in Pattern Recognition. This is heady stuff, well-written, that made my brain feel just a bit more alive and alert while I was reading it. I’ll be on to Zero History to finish the trilogy posthaste.

Watched Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. I want my 128 minutes back.

Oh, memories. I don’t know what spurred my husband G. Grod to rent Real Genius from the library, but I wanted to watch it again, as I have fond memories of friends of mine in high school quoting gleefully from it (something about a 6-inch spike…) Directed by Martha Coolidge, who also directed Valley Girl, and starring an impossibly young looking Val Kilmer, it’s a silly 80’s teen flick that gives a little more credit to nerds and smart kids than others of its ilk did. Silly and fun.

I re-read both Tana French’s The Likeness and its predecessor, In the Woods, in preparation for a discussion at Book and Bars last week. I loved it again this time, again strongly enamored of an academic/intellectual haven depicted, but was surprised to find myself disappointed in the ending, which dragged on and on, for well over 100 pages once the biggest of big reveals happened. Nonetheless, I was happy to spend time with this book, narrated by Cassie Maddox, a supporting character from In the Woods, who is suffering emotional fallout from her previous case when she is presented with an opportunity to go undercover and find who murdered a girl who looked just like her. Cassie’s past and present, undercover and real-world selves, personal and professional lives, get mixed up in complex and fascinating ways as she joins a household of insular intellectuals, all of whom are suspects in the murder.

Like In the Woods, there is a fairly preposterous premise, but I was happy to suspend my disbelief and tear through the book. Even though I knew who did it, I still appreciated the plot, though not the pacing at beginning and end. I was happy to spend more time with Cassie, and liked meeting her former boss Frank. I especially loved her time spent undercover, the group of people she falls in with, and their bizarre but idyllic life:

“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world–we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a farm more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

As I raced to finish the book in time for the discussion, I was shocked to discover something I’d missed the first time through. It’s in a paragraph near the end, so I assume I was skimming through the slow bits the first time I read to get to the end. I shared this with some friends who’d also read the book, who were also shocked when they carefully read this short but powerful paragraph. If you want to check it out and have already read the book, it’s on page 444 of the US Penguin trade paperback.

I read a few interviews with the author, and was not surprised to find she’s an actor, given the depth of characterization and psychological motivation in her books. I was also not surprised she named Donna Tartt’s Secret History as a favorite of hers, and an influence, especially in the plot of The Likeness. I recently read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which has a similar intellectual covey and the author says he re-reads that book every few years. I read it long ago, but think it’s getting time to revisit it, given how much I’ve liked two books strongly influenced by it.

I get the title of Tana French’s debut mystery novel, In the Woods, confused with that of the Sondheim musical, Into the Woods. So forgive me if I type the wrong preposition when writing about French’s novel, which I recently read for the second time. I tore through it the first time, and I tore through it this time, with an added appreciation for the clues and red herrings sprinkled throughout the book as it weaves together two mysteries, a child murder in the present with a case where two kids went missing in the past.

I’m not giving anything away that isn’t on the back cover or in the first pages. The narrator is Rob Ryan, a detective on the (fictitious) Dublin murder squad in Ireland. I was happy to suspend my disbelief when Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox happened to get the call for a murdered girl in the suburb of Knocknaree, the town where two other kids went missing twenty years before. Those two kids went into the woods with a friend. He was found later; they never were. The friend who was found? Adam (Robert) Ryan, the narrator.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception…

This is my job, and you don’t go into it–or, if you do, you don’t last–without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

Rob is smart, charming, and completely messed in the head (understandably) from what happened when he was a child. Whether he’s exactly the right or wrong detective to investigate the new mystery makes for fabulous, devour-able fiction. Well plotted and paced with excellent, complex, psychological characterizations, this was a thumping good read, even when I knew whodunnit. (I am amused that, without referring to my old entry, I chose the exact same quote as I did over two years ago when I read the book for the first time. Perhaps because it just cries out to be quoted.)

Edited to add: In interviews, French says she’s a fan of complex mysteries, like Donna Tartt’s Secret History and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. Not all plot points are tied up neatly and satisfactorily. I was reminded of some of the books of Margaret Atwood, in which the author challenges the reader to decide and imagine for herself what might have happened. A lot of people were outraged that all the mysteries weren’t explained. I found this provocative in a good way.

Red monk, chipping ice, with axe.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The New Atheists’ Narrow Worldview” by Stephen T. Asma:

most friends and even en­e­mies of the new athe­ism have not yet no­ticed the pro­vin­cial­ism of the cur­rent de­bate. If the horse­men left their world of books, con­fer­ences, classrooms, and com­put­ers to trav­el more in the de­vel­op­ing world for a year, they would find some un­fa­mil­iar religious arenas.

Asma has thought-provoking insight into the rise of the atheist debate. He maintains that writers such as Hitchens and Dawkins argue against religion versus science, but don’t take into account much more than mainstream monotheistic religions, which aren’t even the majority. Rather than religion as a source for explaining nature and guiding moral behavior, which most agree can be done better by science, Asma writes about animism throughout the world, and ponders whether the strength of religion is consoling, rather than explaining or guiding. Interesting stuff.

Oh, first-time parents. I don’t know whether to ruefully smile at your naivete, or smack you upside the head. This morning I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation of a first-time mom and a friend of hers. They were sitting next to me at the coffee shop, conversing at normal, overhearable volume. It took a considerable amount of self control for me not to interrupt them. Their topics were the kind of ignorant platitiudes that drive me up the wall. (Hence this rant.)

1. Kids are going to get sick sometime, so even if they’re babies, they’re just building up immunity.

Why this is ignorant: while technically true, it fails to take into account that babies are smaller and more vulnerable physically than bigger kids. Their lungs are smaller, and ear tubes shorter. The older a kids are when they get sick, the better their bodies will handle it, barring extenuating circumstances. I.e., if a baby and an older kid who get sick at the same time, all other things being equal, the baby will get sicker, and for longer. For example, if a baby gets a cold, it often leads to an ear infection that won’t clear up on its own. A bigger kid might just get the cold, no complications. Also, if your baby gets a cold now, its immune system is depressed, and less able to fight off additional exposure to viruses in the short term. This situation is exacerbated in winter by more exposure to people and less exposure to sunshine (vitamin D) and fresh, copious amounts of air.

My interpretation: no need to be paranoid, but take reasonable precautions to prevent your baby from getting sick. Don’t let a sick person hold them, or at least without washing hands. Don’t take your baby around other kids who are drippy and sneezy. And for all kids, respect guidelines like keeping kids home 24 hours after fevers or vomiting.

2. “You know where your baby is in the bed.” I’ve found this vague defense of bed sharing is ALWAYS voiced in the second person, and followed by a variation on “the only cases where kids are rolled on is when someone is obese, drunk, or both.

Why this is ignorant: _I_ had an experience where I did not know where my baby was in the bed. My elder son was a challenging baby. He cried a lot and slept very little, in spite of swaddling, frequent holding, co-sleeping, and other platitudinal solutions. I was sleep deprived and not recovering properly from the birth. In desperation one night, I took him out of the co-sleeper bassinet, nursed him till he fell asleep on my chest (I was on my back) and fell asleep myself. My husband came in a short while later and woke me. I’d rolled over. My son was no longer on my chest or in the vast expanse of bed in the middle. He was between me and the edge of the bed, face down over the small crevice where the edge of the bed met the co-sleeper. Had the co-sleeper not been there he would have been on the floor. Asleep, _I_ had no idea where my kid was in the bed. I was not obese, or drunk. So taking a baby into bed was not for me, and I didn’t do it again. WARNING. SUPER SAD STORY AHEAD. STOP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW. A former co-worker of mine took a nap with her new baby. Not obese and not drunk. Woke and the baby was dead, either through SIDS or suffocation. The mother killed herself soon after. (Maybe after hearing someone say “oh, you know where your baby is in the bed.”)

My interpretation: Throughout history, lots of people have bed shared with infants with no ill results. But some babies have died from it–parents drunk, obese or not–and not every single person “knows” where a baby is in the bed, especially when sleep deprived with a newborn. Your experience is not someone else’s, and it’s not a thoroughly researched double-blind study with zero casualties. Sharing the bed with my baby wasn’t for me. Maybe it is for you, but use the first person and don’t generalize.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I’ve said these things. I’m not immune to small talking; I probably still say things like them. BUT. I have learned that just because I can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it isn’t true for others. Rather, it’s a failure of imagination and lack of experience on my part.

I don’t care that you haven’t seen it before and neither does Linda at NPR, who does a great job of explaining why you should be watching this show:

while bittersweet comedy is a wonderful thing, not all great comedy has to have much bitter in it. Some of it is mostly sweet and still great.

Good comedies are rare, and Parks and Rec is really good. Try it if you haven’t yet.

This is an uncharacteristic girl-y post, inspired by recent (mostly unsuccessful, or at least incomplete) attempts at organization.

I switch bags a lot, depending on where I’m going and what I’m doing, so I try to have a modular case like this to transfer among bags along with my wallet and cell phone. Over the years, the size of the bag has flexed up and down, and the number of items in it, too. This is the result of a recent paring down so it could fit in this smallish clear zip bag, so everything in it is easy to spot. I chose things that were likely to be wanted a lot if suddenly absent. Here’s what made the cut:

chocolate-covered Altoids (mint + chocolate fix = double duty!)
gum
tiny tube of Prada lip balm
lipstick in neutral pink-y brown
packet of tissues
tiny bottle of hand sanitizer
mini pencil
mini pen
nail file
hand lotion
clear pony-tail holders (2)
magnifying mirror
comb
adhesive bandages
antibacterial wet wipes
floss
foam ear plugs
Shout wipe
a pink eyeglass polishing cloth
tiny tin with ibuprofen and a day’s worth of my medication in case I forgot to take it that morning

I saw the film, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, mentioned in the back pages of one of my favorite comic books, Criminal (in “The Sinners” #2), by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Some time later, I saw the book it’s based on recommended The Morning News. I saw the film recommended again, along with the recently released on DVD The Town, as a good Boston crime movie. Then when I finally borrowed it last week from the library, I saw the director was Peter Yates, who had just died, though he’s perhaps better remembered for Bullitt with Steve McQueen and the bicycle movie Breaking Away.

The film is a strange but effective balancing of big and little. Robert Mitchum is Eddie “Fingers” Coyle, a career criminal who’s facing prison time. Mitchum, who was Hollywood royalty at the time, is surrounded by a cast of little-known but terrific character actors. As they move in and out of conversations and meetings with one another, the big picture begins to grown out of the small incidents. It might have been a character study, but it does have a few big scenes, like a choreographed bank robbery and car chase. The moments of action are islands in this mostly quiet film, though. There are few guns fired, and when they go off, they count. This is a grey Boston crime tale of the 70’s, and I’m still mulling over why it’s sad, but not (quite) bleak. The Criterion Collection does not have many extras on the DVD, but comes with a thick booklet with an essay about the film as well as the Rolling Stone piece on Mitchum written while he was filming it.

Director Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, France’s submission for the 2010 Academy Awards and one of the Best Foreign Film nominees, got all sorts of good reviews when it came out, and won all sorts of awards. I’ve seen his previous films, Read My Lips and The Beat that My Heart Skipped, and was impressed by both. A Prophet is much more ambitious, though. At more than 2 and a half hours, it’s the story of a 19-year-old Arab kid in France who goes to prison, and gets an education, in many senses of the word, along the way. He falls in with a gang of Corsicans, who give him protection, yet continually deride him racially. He learns the basics of business, both in and out of prison, as he serves his term. It’s a fascinating character study, with some magical realism thrown in. Several times during the film, I felt momentarily lost and had the urge to stop the DVD and ask questions of my husband. Instead, I gave myself the advice I repeat to 4yo Guppy: keep watching and maybe you’ll figure it out. And I did. For all its length, the film often proceeds at a fast clip, yet when I went with the flow, I got reoriented quickly enough. Long, challenging, violent, but beautiful, thought provoking, and very, very good.

Having recently watched the John Wayne original (which I totally forgot to review last year), I made it out to see the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit. It did not disappoint. In fact, it entertained mightily. The clever, stylized dialogue is perfectly suited to the Coen’s directing. Jeff Bridges and the girl are especially great. I love that character as a role model for girls; she is so smart and tough! Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper have little screen time, but steal every scene they’re in.

Question: Why did Carter Burwell base the score about the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” when that song is tied so distinctly (in my mind, at least) to Night of the Hunter? Did he want to reclaim it to less creepy effect?