A Perfect Day for Reading

Rain, mist, fog, a fire in the living room and a steady, hypnotic drumming of raindrops: who could ask for a better world in which to do nothing but read? We’ve been up at Sea Ranch for a couple of days, and the gray, wet weather remains relentless. When clouds deign to give us a break with a teasing hint of sun, we rush the dog out and throw a tennis ball to slake her all-consuming instinct to retrieve. If ever a creature needed a 12-step program, it’s our beloved Lab: “Hello, my name is Roxie and I’m a tennis-ball-oholic.”
Chris naps (she just finished "Lord of Misrule"), and I read. I decided early this morning not to brave the elements by driving to one of the few places up here where you can buy the Sunday Times. Without that distraction, I’ve made progress on “A Buyer’s Market,” the second volume of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” I’m about a third of the way through, and Powell manages to set but two scenes: a high-society dance and a bohemian party, both attended the same night by narrator Nicholas Jenkins. The scenes are a tour-de-force, funny and insightful about a variety of characters, their pretensions and foibles, nastiness and occasional generosity.
I take a break and pick up April’s Vanity Fair to get to two articles I’d bookmarked. The first describes the making of “All the President’s Men,” in which Robert Redford laments that his friendship with writer William Goldman failed to survive. This leads me to Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” which confirms the reasons he and Redford parted (the script was rewritten, and Goldman thought Redford, who was a producer as well as star, had let him down by failing to come to his defense).
Next comes an excerpt from Alexandra Styron’s forthcoming “Reading My Father,” about life with William Styron, a fine writer (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”) but not the easiest of men. This led to a quick scan of “William Styron: A Life,” a 1998 biography by James L. W. West lll. While not an authorized bio, Styron (1925-2006) cooperated with West, and the book is comprehensive in covering a then still-living subject.
It’s after four. The rain pours. The fire glows. And Anthony Powell awaits.
Bliss.

“Inside Job” and Richard Condon

As I watched this year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job,” my mood quickly slipping from cynical to homicidal thanks to the relentless perp walk of deceiving, greedy, power-hungry con artists from Wall Street, academia and government, I wondered what the novelist Richard Condon would say of this tragic tale centered on the world’s financial meltdown.
In most of his 26 novels churned out over a long, lucrative career, Condon (1915-1996) cast a gimlet eye on the United States and its ruling classes--in his vision an intoxicating cabal of bankers, politicians, Mafia dons, clergy, corporate moguls, CIA agents and lots more scheming frat boys licensed to sell out the country while hypocritically espousing good clean living and praising what Gore Vidal likes to describe as our Sky God.
In his best novels (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “An Infinity of Mirrors,” “Mile High,” “Winter Kills,” “Prizzi’s Honor”), Condon managed to pull off a dandy daily double by displaying the page-turning gift of the best thriller writer while broadly satirizing the twisted, often iconic idiots of American society. Those talents are perhaps most on parade in “The Manchurian Candidate,” a brilliant amalgam of conspiracy and dark humor. Cold-war conservatives could take comfort that the novel describes a Communist plot to install a sleeper agent in the White House (remember the candidate in question is not the brainwashed assassin Raymond Shaw but his moronic stepfather and Joe McCarthy doppelganger, Senator John Yerkes Iselin). Liberals could find some ironic satisfaction that McCarthy/Yerkes was really a Red who had infiltrated the likes of the John Birch Society. As Condon once said: “Every book I’ve ever written has been about the abuse of power.”
Condon clearly had fun writing. He loved strained-yet-memorable similes, witness this opening line from 1974’s “Winter Kills”: “Nick Thirkield once told Keifetz that being in the same family with his father and brother Tim was like living in the back leg of an all-glass piano.”
Even his weaker novels had their moments. In the wake of last month’s centennial canonization of Ronald Reagan, I was struck by Condon’s savaging of the Gipper in 1990’s “Emperor of America” in which a character offers this estimate: ''Ronald Reagan was the greatest President this country has ever produced. He gave us the F.B.I. race wars, the Qaddafi bombings, the 'Star Wars' flapdoodle, the Grenada farce, the Bitburg shaming, the endless bank failures, the Lebanon disasters, the crumbling national airlines, the rape of HUD, the oligarchy of Big Oil, insured inflation and the shoring up of sinister Israeli politicians - all to keep our people diverted and entertained until the Royalty Party could consolidate its position.''
So what would Condon say, not just about the lying miscreants from “Inside Job” but the whole contempory, crazy caravan journeying across our media-saturated, febrile brains on a daily basis? What would he say if exposed to Fox News and its Fantastic Four of Demagogic Nonsense (Bill O’Reilly as Reed Richards, Glenn Beck as the Human Torch, Sean Hannity as The Thing and Sarah Palin as Invisible Girl) or the predictable punditocracy of Sunday morning TV analyzing American politics as if it were an endless football game refereed by the more congenial we’re-all-in-this-together characters from “Advise and Consent”? What would Condon make of the Tea Paty or Michelle Bachmann or Sharron Angle or the Birthers or members of the Westboro Baptist Church or whatever other nut jobs you can think of who are given a spotlight to perform their particular danse macabre?
I think Richard Condon would smile and say, “I told you so.”