Big novels, like big dogs, are more appealing when imperfectly groomed, and for that reason I approached Chang-Rae Lee's big novel, "The Surrendered," with some trepidation. Lee is celebrated for three earlier books ("Native Speaker," "A Gesture Life" and "Aloft") that describe suburban Northeastern life in the manicured yet lush style of Cheever and Updike, creators of beautifully complacent tales of mid-2oth-century privilege presented as the stories of regular guys. Since "The Surrendered" is about the aftermath of the Korean War, it looked to be an inauspicious combination of two things that the contemporary literary novelist often confuses with high art: stretches of fancy, static prose and bleak accounts of hardship and atrocity.
I won't lie and say that "The Surrendered" doesn't occasionally indulge in either of those two things, but that doesn't wind up mattering, because the narrative sweep of the novel turns out to be irresistible. Characters that shoulder their way into the reader's psyche with an almost alarming vitality and Lee's organically skillful plotting are the powerful engines driving "The Surrendered." It's about survival and its costs, as embodied by two people: June Singer, a well-off Korean-born antiques dealer who is rolling up her Manhattan life in the early chapters of the book, and Hector Brennan, an alcoholic janitor in New Jersey. Hector is, implausibly, the father of June's son, Nicholas, though he doesn't know the young man exists and hasn't seen or heard from June in decades. Nicholas has run off to Europe and disappeared, and June has resolved to barge back into Hector's life, insisting that he join the search.
We learn, from the novel's first chapter, what June endured as an 11-year-old refugee fleeing south from North Korea during the war; she lost her parents, her older brother and sister and finally the younger brother and sister entrusted to her care. All this leaves her boiled down to a flinty core of stubborn will and, Hector thinks, "surely the strongest person he had ever known." Whether June's fearsome will was forged by the war or simply revealed by it is one of the novel's mysteries, but without a doubt it's the reason she made it out of Korea alive, as well as why she prospered afterward.
Hector, on the other hand, is merely lucky, although he doesn't see it that way. He's big and, despite his drinking, still fit, "a shockingly beautiful man," according to June's dispassionate assessment. Hector wins every fight he gets into and his wounds heal with uncanny speed. As a soldier in the Korean War, he stepped away, unharmed, from scenes of carnage. With the name of a classical hero and hailing from the town of Ilion, N.Y. ("Ilium" being another name for Troy), he appears singled out for a glorious destiny, but as Hector sees it, he's cursed to trudge onward even as the people around him are destroyed. As an adolescent, he slipped away for an assignation with a married woman instead of performing his nightly duty of walking his drunken father home from the neighborhood bar; his father fell into a river and drowned. Crippled by guilt, Hector has spent his life believing he was "the cause, and the symptom, and the disease; he was the dooming factor for everyone but himself."
What links this unlikely pair is love, not for each other, but for Sylvie Tanner, the wife of a minister who ran the Seoul orphanage where Hector once worked and June once lived -- even then, at the age of 14, she was a notoriously aggressive loner. Sylvie's story is the third strand of the novel, coming in late and telling of her childhood as the daughter of missionaries so devoted to their cause that she felt "set just outside the centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work." Kind and gentle, she represents, for June and Hector, the possibility of emerging from trauma with one's humanity, and ability to feel for others, intact. How did she end up failing them both?
"The Surrendered" moves backward and forward in time with an impressive smoothness, nosing out the events that led June and Hector to unite, however briefly, and create Nicholas. Just once, Lee stoops to sheer melodrama (there's a car crash in the book's second half that's a bit over the top), but it's an error of daring too much, rather than of settling for too little, and ultimately, it's forgivable. So are the moments, not frequent, when he strains too hard after writerly gorgeousness, clotting up his sentences with an excess of metaphorical flourishes. In a novel so rich in the hearty pleasures of storytelling, these blemishes are almost endearing, the overflow of a welcome enthusiasm. Also, Lee's reaching does sometimes work, as when he describes intimacy's tentative return to the middle-aged Hector's life, thanks to a tender barfly: "With each night she spent, another diaphanous layer of her presence seemed to settle upon him and everything else, the fine dust of her that he could almost taste on a spoon, on the rim of a glass."
But who really reads a novel in search of lovely sentences? What most of us hope to meet on the page are characters who bloom into a persuasive illusion of life, and in June and Hector -- one strong of will, the other strong in body -- Lee has most definitely succeeded. It's impossible not to want to know how they came to be the way they are or how they will end up. They may struggle to go on caring, but we don't have to.
Even among the misfits of Greendale Community College, Abed stands out. As Danny Pudi plays him on NBC’s blissfully warped “Community,” Abed is overeager, socially awkward and almost always inappropriate. He has, as one character tells him, “a disorder” he might want to look up. More explicitly, it would appear Abed has Asperger’s, a condition better known to smirking denizens of Greendale as “assburgers.”
In just three episodes, Abed has evolved from a potentially cruel punch line into a nuanced, fascinating and, thank heaven, still hilarious character, one who observes that documentaries are “like real movies but with ugly people.” His frequent cluelessness is a rich source of comedy, but he keeps the upper hand by being the source of the joke instead of the butt of it.
Last week, Abed, spurred by a classmate, took an introductory filmmaking class. His new obsession threatened to alienate everyone in his life, particularly his conservative, immigrant father. But in a witty scene with just the right amount of pathos, Abed showed his dad his short film -- a weird, dark little take on his mother’s abandonment. He had, movingly, found a way of expressing himself. And then he said something offensive.
The pleasure of Pudi’s performance is the way he lets Abed be as utterly exasperating as he is bright and talented. He’s not the huggable romantic hero of “Adam”; he’s just another goofus in the ensemble. Watch Pudi rap in Spanish or try his hand (and foot) at crunking, and behold the joy of an actor being funny without making fun.
What did fans of trashy popular culture do before Bravo reality shows came along? I ask this honestly, partly because I have only the haziest memories of the '90s, but mostly because over the past few years Bravo has become this country's No. 1 purveyor of spectacularly bizarre reality-TV moments. From "The Real Housewives of New Jersey's" "prostitution whore" table-throwing scene to "NYC Prep's" teen supervillain showdowns, the network's shows have become increasingly over-the-top, explosive and entertaining.
They've also become very easy to parody -- although not to parody well. Thank goodness for the folks at KCS Cougar Productions, who have uploaded their smart and creepily dead-on Bravo reality-show cartoon parodies to YouTube. They're all worth a look (especially if, like me, you enjoy watching dramatic readings of "Cop Without a Badge"), but the best place to start watching is their recent "NYC Prep" takedown, which manages to capture the essence of the show's characters (Jessie's money quote: "Brah brah brah, Barney's, brah brah brah, Operation Smile") with remarkable efficiency, if not subtlety.
Their older cartoons are just as sharp. Worth a special look is the "Real Housewives of NYC" reunion video (in which the appearance of a surprise guest causes the countess to spontaneously combust), their "Housewives of New Jersey" parody (in which Teresa shows off her new set of marble dildos), and their Stephanie Pratt vs. label-maker "Hills" showdown.
Check out recent Critics' Picks:
"The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union,'" by Andrew O'Hehir
"Dollhouse" Season 1 DVD, by Mary Elizabeth Williams
Prada fall/winter 2009 look book, by Stephanie Zacharek
"Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales," by Laura Miller
HBO's "Boy Interrupted," by Heather Havrilesky
Much as we worship Joss Whedon, we're still not fully on board for "Dollhouse," the "Buffy" creator's drama about a covert organization that traffics in mind-wiped hotties programmed to be whomever its clients want them to be. As wary "doll" Echo, Eliza Dushku can fill out a tank top like nobody's business, but she's less capable as an actress who has to morph into a new persona every episode. Still, we're encouraged by the show's ambitious exploration of exploitation and consent, and the explosive, late-in-the-season appearance of Whedon vet Alan Tudyk.
The Season 1 DVD offers all 12 episodes, as well as selected commentaries by Whedon and Dushku, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and deleted scenes. But the Holy Grail here is "Epitaph One," the never-aired episode featuring America's biggest geek crush, Felicia Day.
Alternating between flashbacks, present day and 10 years from now, the episode reveals a world where the Dollhouse's personality imprinting technology has gone viral and only a handful of "actuals" -- authentic, original humans -- remain. Day, as a renegade searching for the "cure," is reliably compelling, but the surprise performances come from series regulars Olivia Williams, Amy Acker and Fran Kranz, who alternate between their past and future selves with heartbreaking results.
Fox may have chosen not to air the episode out of concern about its grim vision of the future, but with its multiple twists, dark prognostication and knockout performances, "Epitaph" is the most promising thing the Dollhouse has yet to produce.
Check out recent Critics' Picks:
Prada fall/winter 2009 look book, by Stephanie Zacharek
"Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales," by Laura Miller
HBO's "Boy Interrupted," by Heather Havrilesky
Michelle Forbes on "True Blood," by Laura Miller
Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" on DVD, by Andrew O'Hehir
Fred Weller in "In Plain Sight" (Sundays at 10 p.m. on USA Network)
For many of us who first got hooked on USA Network's "In Plain Sight" when it made its debut last summer, the initial draw was the stupendously cool Mary McCormack as Mary Shannon, an acerbic U.S. marshal, based in Albuquerque, N.M., whose job is to help informers disappear via the witness-protection program.
But in this summer's season -- which ends Sunday -- Fred Weller, who plays opposite McCormack as her partner, Marshall Mann, has emerged, subtly but resolutely, as more than just a sidekick. Marshall is a magpie nerd whose head is filled with bits of possibly useless information that he's gathered hither and thither: Sometimes he practices his Elizabethan English on the job; when he gets a ring stuck on his finger (it happens to be an engagement ring, given to Mary by her fiancé), he makes a half-muttered reference to Ringo in "Help!"
Weller's sidelong, deadpan quips have always been one of the show's pleasures. But this season, the writers have given him even more to do, and Weller -- who, like so many TV actors, also frequently works in theater -- has thrived on the challenge. Weller balances every big feeling with a tempering counterpart: In one episode, when his character escorts an aged mob informer (played, superbly, by Martin Landau) to his son's funeral back East, he shows deep reserves of tenderness without stepping over the line into sentimentality. (It's not called the "Witness Protectiveness Program," but Weller plays Marshall as a guy who knows that a degree of emotional caretaking comes with the job.) And in a more recent episode, Marshall lets it slip, with nothing more than a single guarded, heartsick look, that he's in love with Mary. With that one look he captures the essence of the unpredictability of love, and the reality that -- alackaday! -- it's often ill-advised.
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Michelle Forbes on "True Blood," by Laura Miller
Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" on DVD, by Andrew O'Hehir
Bibio's CD "Ambivalence Avenue," by Heather Havrilesky
"Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading," by Joy Press
"Life on Mars" (UK version) on DVD, by Stephanie Zacharek
HBO's "Boy Interrupted," premieres Monday, Aug. 3, at 9 p.m.
This documentary is the stuff of nightmares for any parent: Evan Scott Perry started talking about suicide in kindergarden. He was obsessed with jumping out a window. "Put him in his room for a time out, it's like Keith Moon in a hotel room," says his dad of the impossibility of disciplining him. "He lacked emotional shock absorbers," reports his older half-brother, Nick. Cobbled together from extensive footage that ranges from hysterically funny to heartbreaking, 2009 Sundance film "Boy Interrupted" tells the story of a precocious but emotionally unstable kid who had all the support and encouragement in the world but still managed to slip from his parents' grasp, killing himself at the age of 15.
Created by his filmmaker parents, Dana and Hart Perry, "Boy Interrupted" is a depressing film, but it's also a smart, thoughtful and informative glimpse at a short life that sheds light on how tough it can be to recognize and effectively treat a kid. Most of all, the Perrys' documentary demonstrates that the biggest obstacle for parents is often a teenager's insistence on appearing normal and fine when he or she is a mess inside. Getting at the truth and providing a welcoming sounding board for your kid, as painful as that process can be, begins to look like the most important goal for the parents of any teenager.
Check out recent Critics' Picks:
Michelle Forbes on "True Blood," by Laura Miller
Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" on DVD, by Andrew O'Hehir
Bibio's CD "Ambivalence Avenue," by Heather Havrilesky
"Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading," by Joy Press
"Life on Mars" (UK version) on DVD, by Stephanie Zacharek
Branded
What's In a Name? A Lot of Grief
Berlin meets the Mob
