The Cronenberg Series Part 18: All the Flesh That Says Yes

About a quarter of the way into Maps to the Stars, the new film directed by David Cronenberg and written by Bruce Wagner, a callow young Hollywood type (Jonathan Watton) and friend, of a sort, to washed-up actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) wonders aloud to Havana regarding the young woman with whom they will soon be enjoying (well two of them will; that the third enjoys it is debatable) a threesome, "I wonder if Blake Shelton peed in that butt." Upon hearing this crass joke, employing as it does the name of a real life celebrity being talked about by movie people in a film (I'm talking about Maps to the Stars here) set in Hollywood the plot of which, or a portion of the plot of which, revolves around, or rather in the vicinity of, the making of another film, one which is the remake of another film thereby providing a link to Old Hollywood, something which is always an important part of these things -- upon hearing this crass joke, as I say, the viewer of Maps to the Stars might reasonably conclude that what they are currently watching is a Hollywood Satire, one of the dark ones like The Player, something about how unforgiving the movie business is, how corrupting it is to the soul, and how twisted are the lives of those who exist within it. Well, to begin with, as far as the film being twisted goes, you have no idea. To the question of whether or not Maps to the Stars is the satire that so many critics have decided it must be, I would say that this is the case only if your definition of satire is "something which makes jokes about another thing." I think that is most people's definition of satire, although in the case of this film you'd actually have to alter the definition again, adding "but not many jokes, and then the jokes stop."

In addition to Julianne Moore's pathetic, amoral actress, Maps to the Stars boasts a freak show of characters, such as Benie Weiss (Evan Bird), at thirteen a recovering drug addict and the star of the Bad Babysitter film series, his parents Christina (Olivia Williams) and Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), the latter an author, therapist, and self-help guru who has among his clients Havana Segrand. She is seeking treatment from Weiss to deal with psychological problems she still wrestles with due to having been sexually abused by her mother, the actress Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon, who has appeared in each of Cronenberg's last three films), who died years ago in a fire, and who appears now to Havana as either a literal or figurative ghost, not sure, could be either one (given the facts of her life and death, I couldn't help but see Clarice as some unholy union of Linda Darnell and Anne Sexton, by which I mean to imply nothing about and give no offense to Linda Darnell). One of Clarice Taggart's movies, Stolen Waters, is being remade with a post-modern twist, and Havana wants desperately -- unhealthily, one could argue -- to play the role of her mother. While frantically pursuing this goal, she hires, on the recommendation of Carrie Fisher (herself), a new personal assistant, or "chore whore," named Agatha (Mia Wasikowska). Fisher got to know Agatha online, and, long story short, Agatha is now fresh off the bus, though doing pretty well under the circumstances, landing this pretty big job pretty quickly, and even striking up a romance with struggling actor/limo driver Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson, moving from the back seat of the limo he occupied in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis to the front, a little detail that I'm sure has been lost on absolutely no one). Agatha seems to be a winningly quirky young woman, remaining sunny even though her face was badly scarred in a fire, her body, she tells Jerome, more badly scarred still. But winning as she may be, that Cronenberg and his team have designed her look to resemble that of Holly Hunter's character in his adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash can't help but raise certain alarms in the heads of Cronenberg fans. In any case, Agatha's arrival in Los Angeles is noticed by Christina and Stafford Weiss, and remarked upon by them with dismay.

I hesitate, briefly, to reveal the source of their uneasiness because among the entertainments that Maps to the Stars offers is a completely mad story whose madness is skilfully parceled out. However, I'd judge it to be maybe just inside the outer limits of acceptable spoilers to say that Agatha's last name is Weiss, she's Stafford and Christina's daughter, and they're uneasy because the last time they saw Agatha she'd just tried to kill her brother Benjie, out of a disturbing, marital kind of love, and set the family home on fire. There is also another reason for their uneasiness, but anyway.

If I'm hesitant to deal with Agatha it's because she's the film's mystery, she's the stranger in black (check out those gloves) who shows up in town and turns everything on its head. This is an archetype found in the Western -- the West being where one can find Los Angeles -- but of course this tradition also exists in horror. Richard Matheson's classic short story "The Distributor" leaps to mind, as does The Intruder, the similarly themed non-horror novel by Matheson's friend Charles Beaumont, which is more instructive in this case in that that book has the premise of a social satire, but is not a satire. That's about as far as I can take this comparison in any event because Agatha, though potentially dangerous, is not menacing. It's not her intention to bring harm, whether she finds herself bringing it or not. So what is her intention?

An answer of sorts, or a clue anyway, could be lying in plain sight. Throughout the film, Agatha performs little rituals -- involving taking her pills, for instance, or, in one instance, kneeling worshipfully over Clarice Taggart's Hollywood Walk of Fame star -- the actions of which she accompanies with a recital of Paul Éluard's poem "Liberté". This happens over and over again, and in the film, this poem, which is twenty-one stanzas, is usually represented by the same few lines (for those as curious and ignorant as me, you'll have to do some digging to find an English translation online close to the one used in Maps to the Stars but this one does the trick pretty well), which are:

On my school notebooks

On my desk and the trees

On the sand on the snow

I write your name

and

On all flesh that says yes

On the forehead of my friends

On each hand that is held out

I write your name

Regarding the background of this poem, the reader and viewer might want to know two things. One is that the poet, Paul Éluard, is one of the fathers of surrealism, and the other is that the poem was dropped from RAF planes over France to serve as a source of inspiration during the Nazi occupation. Knowing that, you can sure see it, can't you, even in these relatively few lines? What's interesting though is that first bit -- which is the poem's first stanza -- "On my school notebooks/On my desk and the trees/On the sand on the snow/I write your name." In addition to being a poem about freedom, "Liberté" is also a poem about devotion, and without any work at all (it's perhaps the way of things that it now takes more work to find the intended meaning) those lines can be made to evoke the love a teenage girl -- let's say, for the sake of argument -- has for a teenage boy. Or a movie star. Or someone who is both.

Things can mean many different things, of course, even clichés. Maps to the Stars, which perhaps not at its heart, because at heart it's sad, but in its bones, and all surrounding tissue, it is an evil movie, so when one character says of a child that he is "a little miracle," it's one of the film's most hair-raising moments. Similarly, that phrase of easy hope, "everything happens for a reason," is turned by Cronenberg and Wagner into an assurance that someone is good and fucked. In this way, a poem meant to inspire those crushed under a bootheel transforms into a chant of sincere love and almost mystical doom. Agatha's burned face stumbles into the City of Angels with a bag full of pills reciting a poem about freedom and we're not supposed to run screaming?  I mean, that the poem is called "Liberté" certainly isn't insignificant -- in the context of Maps to the Stars, the questions are free from what (I have some ideas) and free how? Ah. Yes. Well.

I don't think any of this would displease a surrealist like Paul Éluard, who was, by the way, an ideological mess, which is even better, or rather "better." Surrealism is meant to be disqueting -- that seems to me to be the first step, and sometimes the last step -- as well as grotesque on some level. Something that is grotesque can be awful from the skin on down, or the entire source of its alarm may be simply that physically it skews badly from the norm. Hence pity (asked for and unasked for) and sadness. Hence Agatha. Anyway, these concepts of surrealism and the grotesque challenge reality with the unreal, and Maps to the Stars would like to get in on that. Clocks should drip from trees and freedom shouldn't mean that.

And yes, Maps to the Stars is funny, too, but then Cronenberg usually is to some degree, and plus these days the worst thing you can say about an artist is that they're humorless, which I don't believe is the same thing as saying "Why isn't everything a satire?" The grotesque and the surreal can pull from the audience any number of reactions, from laughter to revulsion to abject horror. Those who don't think Maps to the Stars is a satire have taken to describing it as a horror film, and that's something I can get behind, because it is. And you don't have to stretch the definition the way some people do so they can say things like "In many ways Gravity is a horror film." No -- Maps to the Stars has ghosts in it. Add to this the fact that many horror directors and horror writers (Ramsey Campbell is especially keen to point this out) talk about the close relationship between comedy and horror, having to do, I believe, with the explosive involuntary emotional reaction that both forms can bring from their audience, the loss of control they can force on others, and you start to think that this whole "satire" categorization is a bit of a dodge.

Sure, yes, it takes place in Hollywood, and it does sometimes feel like ninety-nine out of every hundred films set in Hollywood is a satire, but Bruce Wagner, the writer of the film, has made Hollywood his subject or his environment for pretty much his whole career (people who know Wagner's work better than I do have told me that Maps to the Stars is every bit a Wagnerian piece of writing), and so that the characters exist in or around the movie business seems to me to be incidental. You write what you know, so they say. What I'm getting at is, Blake Shelton probably didn't pee in that butt, though even if he did it wouldn't matter.

Capsule Reviews For You and For Me

I watched some movies recently and I haven't posted anything in a while. So here we are.

Annabelle (d. John R. Leonetti) - The reaction to this spin-off prequel (I guess) to 2013's massively successful haunted house/possession film The Conjuring was, well I'll just say it, kind of negative. My reaction to The Conjuring was kind of negative, so I feel like everyone else is getting on this elevator on the fifth floor at minimum, but the truth is that while I did not exactly like Annabelle, I don't feel as compelled to hiss and spit at it as many have been. The reason for this is probably simply that Annabelle, while being worse than The Conjuring, isn't that much worse, and actually has one or two effective sequences. Which is nice.

The titular evil doll, which is ostensibly "based" on a "real" "doll", had a cameo in The Conjuring, in a ghost story prologue to the ghost story, in much the same way James Bond movies have a prologue action scene, and Annabelle tells the story of how that doll became so very wicked. Mia and John, a married couple played by Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton is expecting their first child, and Mia is given the doll by John, and then, long story short, a Satanist bleeds on it. But the sequence that leads to that bleeding ain't bad, as far as suspense and such things go. Eventually Annabelle becomes another skim milk pseudo-exorcism movie, one which drags Alfre Woodard into the tedium, and frankly, though I watched the film yesterday, details are draining from my mind even as I write this. So I suppose my point is, The Conjuring had some nice moments too, and I can't really see the difference.

Robinson Crusoe (d. Luis Bunuel) - The last time I watched a Bunuel film that was (mostly) free of his brand of surrealism (and listen, this is a capsule review, I'm not going to try and describe Bunuel beyond that) it was Death in the Garden, his excellent 1956 adventure about the motley survivors of a plane crash in the South American jungle. Now I've finally caught up to his 1954 adaptation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, and I'll be darned if the two films aren't somewhat similar! Defoe's story, of course, is about the title character's life alone as the survivor of a shipwreck on an anonymous, secluded island. In Bunuel's film, Crusoe is played by Dan O'Herlihy, previously of Orson Welles's Macbeth and later of Robocop, and unlike contemporary films about lone men struggling to survive, like Castaway and All is Lost, O'Herlihy talks a lot -- to animals, himself, mirages, and in narration as a man who is telling his story from some time in the future. The problem with that being that O'Herlihy is not, to my mind, very good here. He seems to be one of those actors who was most at home existing in his own time -- his version of an 18th century sailor is all ramrod posture, booming voice, and big-eyed mugging when taken by surprise.

However, and you'd think this would be impossible for any film version of Robinson Crusoe to manage, the rest of Bunuel's movie somehow overcomes this. It's the second half when it all really comes alive, sometime around a turning point involving Crusoe's animal companions. This is beautifully sad, and begins a kind of understandable breakdown, the cinematic effectiveness of which must be credited more to Bunuel than O'Herlihy. Bunuel pulls back when O'Herlihy's instinct, I suspect, would have been to go huge. Soon, there are cannibals, Jaime Fernandez arrives as Friday, and the drama and adventure crank way up. It's good stuff.

Genocide (d. Kazui Nihonmatsu) - The Japanese film studio Shochiku boasted a who's who of major filmmakers back in its heyday -- Ozu, Mizoguhi, Kinoshita, etc. -- and, for a brief period in the 1960s they also produced horror films. Only four, as it happened, but they're a goony bunch of movies worth just about anyone's time. That doesn't mean I have to necessarily like all of them, though, 1968's Genocide -- whose director Nihonmatsu would only make one other film, The X from Outer Space, also for Shochiku -- is a deeply frustrating piece of work because by all reason I should love it. A swarm of super bees takes down an American bomber. The three crewmen bail out, and the H-bomb they were carrying goes missing. The action from there takes place on a small island in Japan, in a little seaside town.

So what's up with those bees? everyone asks. Their stings are deadly and hallucinogenic. And what's up with the American woman the married resident bug expert is having an affair with? Plus the American military, what a bunch of jerks, right? Those first two are good questions, but that last one causes some problems. Of all the Japanese films that have been made that deal in some way with World War II but which possibly don't acknowledge the extent of the war atrocities for which that country was responsible, Genocide (and what a title, under these circumstances) has to be the most galling. The Japanese heroes all wonder why anyone should ever wish to wage war, especially these American madmen who've lost their precious atomic bomb. Don't they remember that last war? This "Who, us?" attitude goes so far in its obliviousness that the Holocaust becomes a major plot point, as well as a symbol, yet it's never once mentioned that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Japan's main ally during the war. Nihonmatsu seemed to believe viewers would just accept the notion that Imperial Japan in the 30s and 40s stood by incredulously wondering what the world was coming to. Which is ridiculous, and I won't do it.

Five Came Back (d. John Farrow) - So you I do a horror movie, then I do a movie about survival, then another horror movie, and now look at this, another one about survival! In this one, a small commercial airliner, carrying a small load of about ten passengers and a few crewmen, crashes in the Amazon rain forest on the way to Panama City. One thing and another throws the rescue party off the scent and if the survivors -- including the lovely young Lucille Ball as a woman kind of fed up with everything, Joseph Calleia as a murderer being transported for execution and John Carradine as the man doing the transporting, plus others -- are going to get out alive, they're going to have to do it themselves.

Five Came Back is classic Golden Age filmmaking, and it's also one of the more picked-clean-by-buzzards films you'll see. I don't know how many films before it toyed with the idea of a small group of characters in crisis banding together to form modern society in microcosm, one which brings out the best and worst in people, but this came out in 1939 so there couldn't have been that many, and I doubt there were any better -- there certainly haven't been many better since, although the premise has been put to work dozens of times in subsequent years. Farrow, whose best known film is probably the cock-eyed noir His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum, is very elegant in his staging of violence, when it occurs, and he also does a terrific job of making the survivors eventual encampment look both habitable, and like something most of us would want to get away from. On that note, the screenwriters, which include Dalton Trumbo and Nathanael West, pile on the hardships and infuriating (if you have to deal with them, I mean) moral quandaries that eventually separate the good from the bad. In its simple way, Five Came Back is brutally powerful, and finally moving. It packs most things you might want out of a film in 75 minutes. Terrific.

Digging Up the Marrow (d. Adam Green) - And now another horror film! So why am I still watching Adam Green movies? He made his name with Hatchet, one of those intensely violent and horribly knowing, as if this is somehow a plus, slasher comedies from the mid 2000s. Rather than sinking his dreams early, as you might hope would happen, Green now had a career. Four years after Hatchet he made Frozen, no not that one, about three friends stranded on a ski lift. And that one I thought was pretty good. If I watched it today, who knows, but at the time I appreciated that Green winked far less, that he was able to sustain that premise to feature length, and that one character's death, partly due to the performance, actually had an impact. All of this I thought added up to a good sign. But then Green made Hatchet II, which is appallingly shitty beyond all reason. The way my mind works, even though I've ignored Green's cable TV show Holliston and the anthology film Chillerama to which he contributed and which sounds utterly unbearable to me, I'm at the stage with Green where as a discouraged horror fan I think "Let's see what else this prick makes."

Which is called Digging Up the Marrow, and which is Green's first found footage horror film, so that makes you want to poke out your own eyes right there, and which, for a while, seems like a commercial for and misguided celebration of Green's work up to this point. For you see Green plays himself in the film, and he's making a documentary. By way of an introduction we're filled in on Green's credits and his relationship with his fans -- eventually, Digging Up the Marrow, which is partly comedy, will take on that air of self-deprecation the secret goal of which is to puff up its target. So that's obnoxious, but the subject of the "documentary" is William Dekker (Ray Wise), an ex-cop who believes that monsters are real and that he's found where they live. Is he a crackpot? There's a payoff to Green and crew's bumbling investigations, and they take the form of creature designs inspired by the work of artist Alex Pardee.  This, and Ray Wise, make the film worth seeing. Or in the interest of covering my ass, at least make me not regret seeing it. Pardee's work is solidly unusual and his creations generate actual unease. Wise, meanwhile, is wonderful, as he always is, because it doesn't matter what job Ray Wise takes, he's going to make damn sure he shows up for work. So he's a joy to watch. But the found footage thing...it could have life in it, I suppose, if the people who worked within it were willing to take on not just the form's benefits but its limitations, as well. In Digging Up the Marrow it's established that Green has one cameraman, but he edits the film as though he has as many as he needed, because in reality he did. In addition to being lazy and unimaginative, it's frankly insulting.

The Devils Are Free on Earth

Paddy Chayefsky claimed that it was a only a cynicism about the then-current state of American television news that led him to write Network, and a bitterness stemming from his many years' experience as a TV writer had nothing to do with it. Maybe so, though I've always had my doubts. Then again, what the heck do I know about it? Rather than waste time wondering if Chayefsky was telling the truth or not, I could more efficiently address the situation of Arch Oboler, who, having made his bones as a radio writer, had every reason to dread, even hate, the cultural dominance of television; if he did little that was direct with these emotions other than accurately predict the future -- he once wrote that TV would do for radio what talkies did for silent films -- and despite the fact that he did do a tour writing for television, the frustration he must have felt over the constant march of technology was everywhere in his work.

Oboler is probably best known as the man behind Lights Out, the wonderful old horror anthology that aired originally on NBC radio but eventually on a variety of networks from 1934 to 1947. It was a job Oboler inherited from Wyllis Cooper, the show's creator, but many of the most famous stories were written by Oboler, such as "Chicken Heart," a quite odd piece of work when you stop and think about it, but one whose influence on the horror and science fiction genres is nearly incalculable. Consider that this radio play, which lasts about eight minutes, was first broadcast in 1937, and then consider that without this story about a chicken heart turned gigantic and deadly by science run amok, would there be a Them! or The Giant Claw or Tarantula or and etc.? (Godzilla? I don't want to overreach here, but "Chicken Heart" predates World War II and would turn up as the subject of a very famous comedy routine on a stand-up album by never mind who almost thirty years later. "Chicken Heart" has legs, is all I'm trying to get at.) (On that note, when everybody was making fun of Stephen King for supposedly swiping the premise of his novel Under the Dome from The Simpsons Movie, what those people didn't know to do was point out that The Simpsons Movie had already lifted it from Oboler's 1966 film The Bubble.)

Like Rod Serling, the American cultural figure he most resembles, Oboler was a writer whose creative instincts were mostly political in nature, and like Serling he merged those instincts with genres like horror and science fiction -- not always seamlessly, as I'll demonstrate later, but anyway that's also something he shared with Serling. One way in which he differed from Serling was his surprising ruthlessness. Lord knows Serling could go dark with his stories, or at least not stifle the darkness of Richard Matheson or George Clayton Johnson or Charles Beaumont, but did he ever go as far as Oboler did with his Lights Out radio play "Burial Services," which climaxes with a young paralyzed girl being buried alive? I've only read about "Burial Services," but Oboler carried this bleakness with him when he transitioned into writing and directing films, and I've seen it on display in his movies Five and Bwana Devil. Bwana Devil, from 1952, was a pioneering work of early 3D filmmaking, but that aside it's also an early cinematic depiction of the story of the Tsavo lions, which killed several workers during the building by a British company of a railroad line in Africa, a little piece of history that briefly became an en vogue kind of thing to know about back in 1996, when The Ghost and the Darkness, the Stephen Hopkins/William Goldman film on the subject, came out. Anyway, in the film, in Bwana Devil, an adorable young boy (Miles Clark) wanders happily away of the safety of the camp, and with minutes left in the film his body -- partially eaten, on assumes -- is found by a horrified Barbara Britton. In Five, possibly Oboler's best work since he left radio behind, or since radio was taken from him, that hope has been engendered in the hearts of the small handful of survivors of a nuclear apocalypse by the baby being carried in the womb of Susan Douglas Rubes is no guarantee that their hope hasn't been misplaced. Let's put it like that.

Before checking the facts, my gut feeling was that Five was made after Bwana Devil because as effective as the latter film can sometimes be, and as strong as the final couple of jolts are, it is nevertheless a film that throughout feels like one hampered by compromise and a meager budget, and perhaps a paucity of visual imagination on Oboler's part -- faking a lion attack in the 1950s couldn't have been easy, but he too often relies on close-up reaction shots of witnesses, and even victims, who are often seen making "Ow!" faces as a lion rips them apart. I assumed, therefore, that the more assured and more plainly independent Five came after Oboler got fed up with the money men. Free of needing to tell a story that should naturally cost more money than is at hand, Five has the cheap black and white sharpness and immediacy that would later characterize classics like Night Tide, Carnival of Souls, and Night of the Living Dead. This doesn't mean that Oboler had those kind of chops, but watching it, it feels like the weight of Bwana Devil has been lifted from his shoulders. Except that Bwana Devil was 1951 and Five was 1952, and maybe having the weight of Bwana Devil lifted from his shoulders is what led to The Twonky in 1953. Based on a story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, The Twonky is ostensibly a science fiction satire of TV and its effects on society, you know, shit like that, but as a comedy the movie flails around so desperately that even at just about seventy minutes the manic pace has somehow transformed into cold syrup. On top of that is the explanation behind the powers of the sentient and extraordinarily powerful TV set, or "twonky," which is that it's not a TV set but rather an alien thing that randomly took the form of a common Earth object. Clearly, television has yet to recover. Ruthless, The Twonky is not, though you can't say that Hans Conreid, who plays the harassed owner of the TV (except as a college professor he never wanted one anyway), doesn't give it his all.

As a creative option, film pretty much died for Oboler after that. He wouldn't make another feature until One Plus One in 1961, and he wouldn't make another feature that anyone remembers until The Bubble in '66. It was between this and Domo Arigato, his last film from 1972, that Oboler would produce one of the strangest works of his career, this time a novel, his only one, 1969's House on Fire. 

House on Fire, which was recently reprinted by Valancourt Books, may or may not bring the spotlight back around to Oboler, but to what end I couldn't say. It's such a deeply strange book. The germ of the story appears to have been in his head for more than a decade prior to publishing House of Fire, because the basic premise is the same as that of a short TV film he wrote in 1958 called Hi, Grandma! Basically, in House on Fire, a young boy named Mark Elias is discovered to be a genius, and by inventing a...an invention, he wins a full college scholarship, to whatever college he chooses. As you'd expect with a boy genius, Mark is solitary and deeply focused on his inventions; he's aided, and adored, in this by his younger sister, Shirley, and the two of them spend a lot of time in Mark's room behind closed doors. As the novel opens, Sam and Mary, Mark's parents, are planning a family celebration in honor of Mark's achievement. Present will be Mark's brothers Dave and Nat, and his sister Harriet. There will also be two reporters, one a radio veteran named Tony Dumont, and a shy, virginal cub reporter for a small newspaper named Robin Shepherd. Both are covering Mark's story ostensibly from an uplifting human interest angle, but when Robin and Tony meet each other in the apartment building elevator, Tony strikes her as self-centered and bloviating, and she doesn't entirely trust him.

There's something quite mysterious about Mark and Shirley, though, Mark in particular. It seems to have something to do with their grandmother, Sam's mother, who we're told has recently died. Sam and his siblings don't appear overly torn up by this, however, and Sam's wife Mary is somewhat dismayed by this, though neither her husband nor her in-laws are much interested in holding back their opinions about the dead old woman. She was, evidently, a horrorshow -- it's said she purposely drove her own husband, Sam's father, to suicide -- and if Sam and his increasingly unstable sister and brothers have one great concern regarding Mark and Shirley, it's that the time they spent with their grandmother, which was not insignificant, has warped them. When Mark unveils his new invention, after Tony and Robin have left the party, it turns out to be, he says, a machine that can communicate with the dead. The gist of all this is that soon after his demonstration, which produces only a high-pitch whine and the sound of a screeching cat, Nat collapses and dies.

And so on. One interesting thing about House on Fire is that it was published after Levin's Rosemary's Baby and before Blatty's The Exorcist, Tryon's The Other, and King's Carrie, the other other novels that joined together to produce the boom in the genre that fueled it for the next two decades or so. Which proves only that as always, Oboler had a knack for being on or near the ground floor or major genre developments without ever being recognized for it. Of course, House on Fire isn't as good as those other books. One thing that may have held it back, though this is something that I myself don't hold against it, is the sense that this is a novel that is badly out of step. By which I mean, House of Fire couldn't have felt current in 1969, even with its references to Vietnam and what Amy Landecker as Mrs. Samsky in A Serious Man calls "the new freedoms."  But House of Fire is written like a novel by an ex-radio writer who understands that form's approach to style, structure, and atmosphere. This could be seen as a plus, and in fact that's kind of how I see it: the novel is 175 pages long. Nat collapses and dies on page 65. This is the first truly concrete piece of evidence the reader has that something is seriously wrong in the Elias home. Before that what you get is a lot of conversation, most of it occurring within the apartment of Sam and Mary Elias, among them alone, or eventually among them and Sam's siblings, and once with another tenant, a woman who brings a cake for Mark -- all of this being preparatory to Mark's big party -- a woman, I'm just now realizing, never again appears in the novel, though her sudden presence would seem to indicate a significance that she doesn't actually possess.  It's strange.

Also strange, or not, depending on how you feel about it, is the fact that very little of any of the conversation between any of the characters is "important," that is, very little of it relates to the plot. Mary telling Sam to not eat any cake before the party. What college Mark should choose. Harriet's concerns that her virginity will be a barrier in her relationship with a man she met (virginity is kind of a thing in this book). All of this dialogue, and the tone of it, especially when many characters are in a room talking, recreates the atmosphere not of reality but of old radio shows, where sound is everything. To create a mood and make a scene believable, those radio shows had to pour on the noise, so that everyone talking fast, one after another, with plates and forks pinging together, surrounds the listener. That's more or less what Oboler is doing in the first third of House on Fire, and even in 1969 it was a throwback, but it's a throwback to something I like. Better, it's not a self-conscious throwback -- it's simply how Oboler thought, and worked.

Then someone, usually Mary, will say something that will remind everybody else of the deceased grandmother, and things begin to spiral. After Nat dies, of course, the plot takes off, as does a subplot about Robin falling for the photographer who was assigned to accompany her to the Elias's apartment. And this is where House on Fire almost completely goes off the rails. I'll spoil it, because I have to talk about it: the young man, Bob Farrell, is a wonderful fellow. He's so wonderful, in fact, that it's hard to not imagine that something is wrong with him, or at least that he's doomed. When Robin goes back to his place after dinner and it turns out he owns a very early kind of microwave, this interest in new technology pegs him, in Oboler's world, as someone very suspicious indeed. And it turns out he's a pornographer who drugs women and photographs them nude. Tony Dumont, whose relationship with Robin up to this point has been adversarial even though the reader knows them to be on roughly the same team, learns this and swoops in just in time to save her. Well, the photos are taken, but Tony gets those, and when Robin comes to he tells her what's what. She's having an understandably hard time with this, so Tony decides he'd best leave her alone. However, before leaving:

Tony Dumont said, "I forgot to tell you one thing. You don't have to worry about having been raped. Mr. Farrell is quite incapable. He cannot be aroused by anything but boys." Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "I didn't either. That's not to say I wasn't tempted." He went, closing the door behind him.

Now. Okay. Look. The Bob Farrell episode has little to do with the rest of the book, other than to demonstrate the vileness of which men are capable. And typically I don't object to the inclusion of characters or incidents which have little bearing on the main plot. I don't need to have things joined up for me. But when our male hero tries to sweet-talk our female hero by saying he was tempted to rape her, some sort of explanation might be nice. This being quite apart from the fact that this whole section of the book is completely absurd, far more absurd than the supernatural elements, despite the fact that what Farrell is up to has been done time and again, and no one has yet invented a machine to communicate with their dead, demonic grandmothers. What Dumont says is, of course, appalling, and when I read it, and subsequent passages dealing with Robin's sexuality, I began to think that House on Fire was becoming unsalvagaeble. There's other stuff involving Mark and Shirley which, while never graphic, nevertheless made me wonder just how skeevy this thing was going to get. In its implications, at least, it turns out the answer is pretty dang skeevy.

However, while none of what I've just described is in any way good, the novel does become strange, and complicated (in a way that, admittedly, is hardly addressed), enough that I feel like it would be too easy to assume that Oboler thought Tony's way with women, for example, was just swell (the Mark and Shirley stuff I don't know about, but I'm inclined to think that it was either Oboler's attempt to boost the evil in a way William Peter Blatty would later do much more successfully in The Exorcist, or that Oboler was pressed into it by the publisher -- either way, it's a bad idea that adds nothing, and Oboler should have given it a wide berth). Late in the novel, the character has a crazy monologue that reveals things about him which makes it easy, if you're feeling generous, to at the very least imagine Oboler connected in his own mind to the earlier comments about rape. As well, the character Oboler seems to most identify with, a blind artist friend of Tony's, even makes an accusation related to Tony's intentions towards Robin that he, Tony, doesn't like at all. Admittedly, it's possible I'm looking for excuses here, when my usual inclination is to wince about these things but not otherwise feel too tense about something a man who died over twenty years ago wrote over forty years ago. It's just that House on Fire is such a wild, galumphing thing that it's hard to not try and find some central joist that will keep it from toppling.

The evils of technology might provide it. Apart from Bob Farrell's microwave, there is the question of whether Tony will abandon the magic of radio for the spoon-feeding of TV, and of course there's the central idea of a new invention that threatens to take down a whole family. In one of the several conflicted theological discussions in the book (another thing that links House on Fire with Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist), Dave Elias talks about God having "his eyes burned out by the fires in the concentration camps, by the hell over Hiroshima." In that same argument, Tony -- an atheist who butts heads quite condescendingly with Robin, a believer who is portrayed, intentionally or not, as someone who possesses a faith that is entirely unexamined -- blames everything vile in the world not on God or demons, but on man who has done these things "all through history," a phrase which both expresses an unwavering belief about man's nature and could be read as a code for what Oboler regards as the worst kind of progress: the kind of progress that allows men to kill each other on a grander scale.

That may be trite, and I suppose it is either way, but it would be more so if in Five Oboler hadn't been one of the first artists to really deal with the subject. And he kept trying to deal with it, even when it sits somewhat uneasily within what, if you strip it down, is a rather straightforward horror premise -- a premise, by the end, that you realize was hardly dealt with. That doesn't mean the ending of House on Fire isn't strong, because I think it is, or that the novel as a whole isn't worth your time, because something this bizarre always is. It reads like a book written by a man who had too much in his head and was having a hard time holding focus. It was also written by a man who was fed up with technology and was ditching it all in favor of a pen and paper. Maybe he saw it as his last chance.

Megalopolis

Speaking about Argentinian literature, Jorge Luis Borges once said "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature." I learned this from the back cover of the new NYRB Classics edition of Ocampo's selected stories called Thus Were Their Faces.  In the introduction to that book, I learned from writer Helen Oyeyemi that Argentina's National Prize for Literature was denied to Ocampo because the judges deemed it "too cruel." This, a footnote clarifies, was in any case Ocampo's own read on the matter. Regardless of the cause, winning that prize would have probably lifted Ocampo, who died in 1993, to greater international status. Because Borges's word is not enough, I suppose. The point being that from what I can tell, very little of Ocampo's fiction or poetry has published in the United States, or even translated into English, until now. The NYRB volume of stories, which comes out on Tuesday, will be accompanied by another book, a selection of her poetry. Borges' enthusiasm wasn't based on nothing.

In fairness, sort of, one reason why Ocampo's fiction might have has a difficult time finding a publisher in the US is that much of her work, to judge from Thus Were Their Faces, was of the short-short fiction variety -- that is, many of her stories range from about two to maybe five or six pages long. Borges's stories were like that too, for the most part, and maybe once such dense fabulist from Argentina was enough for the US literary world. When I do the The Kind of Face You Slash series, the month-long review of horror fiction I do (almost) every year, I always read a fair number of very short stories, and at least in that genre, which is not one to which Ocampo's writing bears no resemblance, the problem is often that the writers plows heedlessly through an idea that could have used some more room to breathe, and God knows why they did that, or the point all along was to grind out a couple of pages of abstract mood, which is not my favorite thing to read (although the success of the stories covered in both examples depends, as always and forever, on the talents of the writer). It's a strange form that can feel very unnatural, and can be broken by the stories being forced into it.

The contents of Thus Were Their Faces are laid out chronology, and cover a span of over fifty years, from 1937 to 1988. The shortest story is two pages (there are more than one of those) and the longest, admittedly, is about sixty (there is only one of those), and all together a total of forty-two stories were collected. Not once did I find a story that seemed unfinished, or plowed through heedlessly. Granted, there are a few of the densely abstract variety, and I'll confess here that those stories did little for me.  All of them come from the later years. In stories like "And So Forth," "The Music of the Rain," "Sheets of Earth," and "(Com)passion," the fantastical and weird elements over which Ocampo was capable of exerting such control can feel watery, the stories gone from my head before I'd started the next one. But typically, this isn't the case. Outside of Borges, I've never read fiction of such brevity that nevertheless felt as complete as, for example, "The Perfect Crime," which packs domestic tension, class resentment, a horrific crime, and an unreliable narrator all into barely four pages, or in "Forgotten Journey," Ocampo's crystallization of the young heroine's dawning realization that the facts of human biology are essentially grotesque into three.

Like Borges, if Ocampo had been American I believe she would have been considered a genre writer, Ocampo especially, as her stories sometimes flirted with or openly embraced genre conventions. One of the best stories in Thus Were Their Faces is "Men Animals Vines" from her 1970 collection Days of Night. In this story, the narrator is stranded in the jungle following a plane crash. He's the only survivor, and the environment threatens to drive him mad:

At night there are fireflies and deafening cicadas. A soft penetrating perfume seduces me: Where does it come from? I don't know yet. I think it's good for me. It comes from flowers or trees or herbs or roots or from all of those at once (maybe from a ghost?); it is soothing perfume. Smelling like a dog -- will I turn into a dog? -- I tear at the leaves, the plants, the wildflowers that I encounter.

The flora is -- is it? -- the big threat here, and so, surprisingly, although the title might tip it off, "Men Animals Vines" falls into the "deadly vines" horror subgenre. If you are so inclined to categorize it, anyway, which you needn't necessarily be, but even so. Look also at "Friends," about two boys, one of whom has a terrible power that warps him. It is, in fact, not entirely unlike Jerome Bixby's classic 1953 story "It's a Good Life," though, among many other differences, Ocampo's ending is a long way from Bixby's (which shouldn't be taken as a knock on either).

In terms of genre, one of Ocampo's most interesting stories in Thus Were Their Faces is the novella "The Impostor." One of two stories taken from her 1948 collection Autobiography of Irene, "The Impostor" kicks off much as Patricia Highsmith's 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley: Armando Heredia's father is concerned about the way his son is living and so sends another young man, our narrator, to the family ranch, where Heredia is living along with a few servants, to spy on him and report back. Interestingly, in the classic tradition of many eerie stories, this narrator is unnamed for much of "The Impostor"'s 60 pages, but then near the end he gets a name. The name isn't a twist or any kind of revelation -- he just hadn't seen the need to tell us until there was a contextual reason. At any rate, he's disturbed; not, perhaps, homicidal, but paranoid, in a way that makes him a good, or maybe terrible companion to Heredia, who frequently suspects the narrator of being a spy, and threatens to kill him. The narrator puts Heredia off with various sincere explanations for his strange behavior, that, even when accepted, still leaves their friendship within a sinister cloud:

I tried again to explain to him that it was a matter of dreams. I made a list of objects and people that I had met in dreams before meeting them in reality; I described them in great detail. I told him about several dreams, with no luck; they were vague, monotonous, and had no fantastic virtues. They were dreams that served as the basis for deeper reflections -- only to me were they real...

Heredia accepted that I hadn't been snooping around the house. By evening we were reconciled. Lighting our way with a lantern, we climbed a narrow green staircase and into the attic to look for a whip...Heredia wanted to show me a jewelry case and trunk where various old family keepsakes were stored. He wanted, with some ill will, to show me the awful palace of the bats.

This is all heading towards an ending that some may consider quite modern, and I suppose it is, in a sense. The modern version of this ending, however, is a cheap one, and has been made so by time and overuse. In 1948, and in the hands of a writer like Ocampo who isn't using it as a means to simply jerk people around, I'm reminded of the power that such endings once hand, and can still have if they're backed by conviction. As a result, "The Impostor" doesn't lose any of its creeping strangeness after the final lines are read, but becomes sad in addition to that.

In "The Impostor," there is some small element of clairvoyance to the proceedings, which turns out to be a favorite conceit of Ocampo's. You'll find some form of it in many of these stories, but it's used most brilliantly in "Autobiography of Irene," which imagines the ability to see into the future as an overwhelming experience that supplants memory -- there is a terrible and ingenious logic to this -- so that this amazing power is one never to be desired, and "The Doll," which uses passionate melodrama as a kind of origin, or a prelude to a story Ocampo didn't write. That Ocampo wrote last line of "The Doll," whereas it never would have occurred to me, is the kind of thing I could become quite jealous of.

And there is, of course, lots more. If the selection of four stories from Ocampo's 1987 collection And So Forth, which comes near the end of Thus Were Their Faces, turned out to be my least favorite, this matters little given how strong, varied, and copious the rest of the book is. Plus, the book closes out (nearly) with "Cornelia Before the Mirror," a long story told almost entirely in dialogue, which may be, probably is, actually a fractured monologue. Given its structure, it's kind of a tour de force of clarity, when you think about how it could have gone, and it also boils the madness and loneliness and the longing for death that is the make-up of so many of Ocampo's men and women down to its essentials, while bringing old metaphors, like mirrors, back to life. Which is something I hope Thus Were Their Faces will do for Ocampo herself.

Mann

Pretending That I'm Doing Well

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was the first film made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that I ever saw. This was some years ago, and what I remember about my reaction was that basically it was a good movie that I would tell people I liked, should the subject ever come up, but that it was also, very plainly, Not My Kind of Thing. However I would have defined what that thing was then would be very different from how I'd define it now, because via the doorway of The Tenderness of Wolves and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (both of which, admittedly, are cheating) I have since become somewhat guardedly fascinated by Fassbinder's work. I say guardedly only because there's so goddamn much of it, despite his early death at age 37 (I am two years older than Fassbinder was when he died, and I have made forty fewer movies), and also there is frequently, but certainly not always, an aggressive weirdness that I, for one, kind of have to be in the mood for. Watch Satan's Brew if you don't know what I mean, although that may be an extreme example. Or not. I haven't seen everything.

Anyway, the chance to come full circle with Fassbinder has presented itself with the Criterion release of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and I'll tell you, whatever my thing is now, this movie fits right in.  Adapted by Fassbinder from his own play, the entirety of the film takes place within the home of the titular Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), a successful fashion designer whose career, one nevertheless senses, is currently not as robust as it once was, or anyway that's how she views it, even though she doesn't want anyone else to view it that way, or to know she views it that way. She presents a facade of optimism even to her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), though as is often the case in these situations she's probably not fooling anyone, least of all Marlene.  What will also become apparent is that Petra isn't as comfortable with her life as a currently unmarried woman -- one marriage ended in her husband's death, and the second in divorce. She talks about her ex-husband quite often, and claims that she ended the marriage much to the disbelief of Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), Petra's subtly malicious cousin. Sidonie introduces Petra to Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young woman who Petra seduces into being both her model and her lover.

The film jumps ahead in time here, though exactly how far it's difficult to say. Initially, considering how devoted Petra has become to Karin, I thought we were at least several months along, but Petra's overall emotional fragility allows for the possibility that we've picked things up sometime next week. So Fassbinder's approach to time compression here is intriguing, even though his methods here are common in live drama. This doesn't change the fact that, unlike most films, Petra's emotional swings can't be exactly traced through what we've seen before. But even though the motivations of this fictional character aren't written in lights, as a human being Fassbinder and Carstensen's depiction of Petra is precise. Gaudy, too: in every act, Petra is wearing some new outfit the design of which is pitched at some level of insanity. The extravagance is one thing, but it's extravagance of a particularly blinkered variety. This may be like saying this soup is particularly brothy, which is also, I believe, kind of the idea.

Of course, though the bitter tears may belong to someone else, by the end of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant it's hard for me to not think of it as Marlene's film. As Marlene, Hermann never speaks, and most of the time she's in the background of a frame full of clutter and drawings and mannequins (this is one of the great doll and mannequin films, along with others such as Kubrick's Killer's Kiss and Soderbergh's Bubble) and of course Petra. But Fassbinder and Michael Ballhaus, his master cinematographer, know exactly when and how to pick her out of the scenery -- sometimes, to literally highlight her. Marlene loves Petra, you see, and has spent God knows how many years having her heart crushed as Petra moons over, or pursues, or catches, others. Worse, late in the film when Karin says Marlene is "screwy," Petra -- in front of Marlene -- corrects her, saying that actually Marlene "loves me." So she knows, has always known, and has the nerve to to be the one seeking pity. Twice, Marlene's feelings are expressed, and both times this is done through songs by The Platters: "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" first, and much later "The Great Pretender." I'd say this is the best cinematic use of The Platters of all time, especially the latter one, which through shadows, a bright light, a black dress, and one character pausing significantly as they walk through a room, achieves a kind of masterpiece in miniature, one that, like the best endings, reflects back across the rest of the film.

He Had Simply to Open His Pen

I've read more than one author express the opinion that the perfect form for prose fiction is the novella -- it's short enough to keep the writer focused and long enough to break free from the tyranny of "not a word is wasted," which I'd say more readers than writers consider the strength of the short story. Of course this isn't the opinion of everybody, but in my own meager way I think I understand it: if the only rule was to write until you're done, I believe we'd have more novellas than novels, or anyway more novellas than we currently do. The problem now of course, and this has been the case for some time, is who will publish them? If you're a writer of a certain stature you might once have placed a novella in a special issue of a sympathetic magazine, but I'm not sure any such magazine exists now, for anyone. Those writers of stature can also publish a collection of three or four novellas, or sometimes you'll see a novella published as a standalone novella; this sometimes does still happen, but I suspect some readers feel ripped off (in fairness, on some level I can't blame them). Anyway, there it is, roughly speaking, and so it was interesting to learn recently about Alan Judd, a British novelist who gained a fair bit of notice in 1981 with his novel A Breed of Heroes, and whose fiction by and large seems to tend towards the tradition of military satire that is so hallowed in England, but whose best-known and most acclaimed work is a 90-some page horror novella from 1991 called The Devil's Own Work.

And as I so often wonder, where do I begin with this thing? As a work of horror, the novella, which was published as a standalone book in 1991 and has just now been reprinted by Valancourt Books, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, is easily pinned down -- almost too easily, I was at various times tempted to think, but The Devil's Own Work is as a whole rather elusive, however easy it may be to compare its plot to other books and stories. Which I suppose I should dispense with now, so the plot is this: a narrator, unnamed, is telling us the story of his friend Edward. No last name. Edward was a famous novelist whom the narrator knew for most of his life, though he, the narrator, imagines that friendship meant less to Edward than to him, as Edward was in many ways quite closed off and perhaps incurious about the lives of others. At any rate the friendship endured, and as the narrator's life proceeded along more or less "ordinary" lines, Edward sought his place in the literary world, writing articles and reviews and one novel until he wrote a damning career overview of the aging lion O. M. Tyrell. This leads to a meeting between Edward and Tyrell, which is succeeded very shortly by Tyrell's death by heart attack. Not terribly long after this, Edward's career as a novelist takes off. Among the clues pointing to the kind of horror story The Devil's Own Work is are the mysterious and beautiful woman who was Tyrell's final companion in life, and the fact that the first time the narrator sees Edward after the old writer's death, Edward is smoking cigars which he'd never done before, but which Tyrell had.

So there you go, case closed. And it is that kind of story (although I've seen some reviews from 1991 that say this is a book about demonic possession, which is wrong, and the kind of conclusion those who don't read horror jump to, which might sound snobby, but oh well), but it's possible that Judd wasn't terribly interested in The Devil's Own Work reading as a horror novel, even though it's got the plot of one, and the ending of one, and the title of one. But it's actually that title that's the key to whatever point it is I think I'm trying to make here. Here's the narrator, talking about Edward's writing, and the general state of contemporary literature, following Edward's sudden increase in productivity and fame:

Edward prospered...He became a leading writer among what were then known as the post-modernists, exponents of something called "fictive realism" according to which reality and fantasy had the same status. This resulted in writers thinking that they could write what they liked, that they had no obligation to convince or render, that they need not discriminate except on grounds of what pleased them. The cause of this was a failure of imagination, or of belief in the power of imagination to interpret life, and it led to contempt for the reader. It had, I think, an intellectual justification at the time, a supposedly absolute skepticism which maintained that since reality was no more to be trusted than fantasy nothing could be finally proved -- whatever that meant.

...I know I am old-fashioned...but I have been made so by experience. It was the new truths that failed me, not the old ones, and I do now believe that anything that confuses reality and unreality, or that attempts to equate the two, is the devil's own work.

I don't think it's unfair to assume that, though ostensibly the beliefs of a fictional character, that this literary philosophy roughly corresponds to Judd's own, and, suffice it to say, I disagree pretty much completely with the literary philosophy laid out here. I'm particularly hung up by the phrase "This resulted in writers thinking that they could write what they liked," implying as it does that they couldn't. Among the sins that the narrator has grown to believe Edward the writer committed, as did O. M. Tyrell before him, is the favoring of literary style over meaning -- in other words, and not even particularly other, he's a style over substance writer. Judd leads us in this direction early when he has Edward explain that the concept of his first novel, written before he met Tyrell or Eudoxie, his sinister and beautiful companion (and before he got the strange manuscript, which I mention only to hammer down the summary a little bit more), was to write a novel that was free of conscience, but had to acknowledge his failure when he realized that in if a conscience is noticeably absent from a novel, that deliberate absence will almost by definition render the conscience present. If you follow me. Anyhow, the idea was noticed and appreciated by Tyrell, and its clear that he believes the actual goal is not out of reach. But what I'm reminded of is the time William H. Gass (I think it was him, but it might have been Stanley Elkin or John Hawkes or somebody else entirely) said that the word "daffodil" was more beautiful than the flower itself. One might debate this and not lose sight of the point, but it's a point that Judd, in The Devil's Own Work regards as evil.

Or at least I think he does. Not literally evil, of course, but apart from that question is the one about what precisely Edward is writing. I find The Devil's Own Work fascinating, and disagree with it though I do, and though I'm with Nabokov in believing that asking what a writer is trying to say can only lead to tedium, I'm in love with the fact that The Devil's Own Work is a horror story about competing literary philosophies. But it would be much easier to grapple with if we were given some specific details about Edward's novels. The only detail we get about anybody's fiction is the understandably, given the circumstances, on-the-nose bit about Tyrell's last novel being a play on the story of Faust. But in terms of style or even general story or concept behind anything Edward writes after meeting Tyrell, we're given nothing. How important is this, though? Well, ironically, and it's not at all outside the realm of possibility that Judd is fully aware of all of this, that depends at least in part on how much significance you place on what Judd is trying to say. Aha. Plus, as I understand the term fictive realism (not terribly well, I sometimes think) and the kind of fiction such a theory might produce, The Devil's Own Work, with its unreal supernatural elements sitting within it as realistically as descriptions of dinner dates and small talk, would fit in comfortably with everything the narrator disdains. On top of that, though I said earlier that I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine the narrator's opinions coming from Judd's own mouth, any first-person narrator, who in terms of plot seems only to function as an observer, worth his or her salt will actually bear more of the story's weight than one might at first glance think. So how much does it matter that the narrator believes himself to be boring? How important is it that the narrator, who is not a writer, has such a fascination with the writing process? Does he cling to the not overly warm Edward for so many years simply because Edward is a writer? Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and, for instance, I don't believe one needs to be a novelist or film director to criticize novels or films, where, really, does this narrator get off deciding what writers can or can't do? And finally, though I acknowledge the complete subjectivity of this, how important is it that I needed to go back and check to see if the narrator was indeed never given a name, and I hadn't simply forgotten it?

But there's a real passion to the opinions expressed by the narrator, and I can't let go of the idea that they belong to Judd in reality, which in some sense would render The Devil's Own Work nonsense, because what it's "trying to say" would be, for me, nonsense. Though not ineffective nonsense, and anyway it's not lost on me that potentially the best way to gain a better understanding of what's underneath this strange little book is to become familiar with the novels Judd wrote before it, and after it (Judd wouldn't write another novel for ten years after publishing The Devil's Own Work, a fact which probably means nothing, but from this distance looks like it might). In an afterword to this new Valancourt edition, Judd writes that one of the primary inspirations for the novella was the night he met Graham Greene and they talked about Ford Madox Ford, who had recently passed away. Judd left that meeting realizing that he didn't like Greene (not a brand new opinion, as I understand it), but wasn't entirely sure why. Judd also says that he believes The Devil's Own Work is the best writing he's ever done, and is nothing at all like the rest of his work. We're all left to ourselves, to make of this what we will.