After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima

Death figures heavily in the writing of Yukio Mishima, as even a casual reader knows. However, his 1960 novel, "After the Banquet," does not fit so neatly into the complete body of work. I've previously written about Mishima here and here.


Mishima himself grouped his novels into two categories - pièces noires and pièces roses, of which "After the Banquet" falls in the former category. It has a female protagonist and dashes of humor, and it displays an advanced and detached understanding of contemporary Japanese domestic politics. And its stance on death, more than anything, gives it a place of its own among Mishima's bloody and brilliant works.

"After the Banquet" opens with Kazu, the female owner of the Setsuogoan, a Tokyo restaurant frequented by the powerful and rich. Kazu's ownership is the culmination of a long climb to respectability, and her reputation as a hostess is well-known and well-earned. Her life changes when she meets Noguchi, a semi-retired former minister possessing a quiet style and a proud, stubborn, antique modesty.

The two form an attachment that later leads to marriage, though laying dormant in their relationship is their incompatibility. Kazu has a fierce, protective love for Noguchi, but we understand that she also sees their marriage as the final seal on her acceptance into polite society. But she is, at long last, an independent woman, and her love for the diplomat is complicated by the demands of her owning the Setsuogoan. Noguchi then begins a political campaign that Kazu takes part in, to the frustration of her husband. She discovers another part of herself in the process.

"After the Banquet" does not often get into the heads of its characters, dwelling instead on details of dress and scenery, going so far as to produce the menu for certain meals at social occasions. There may have been other reasons for this beyond simple considerations of style. Mishima based the story on events in the life of a real politician, Hachiro Arita, who later sued for invasion of privacy in a famous Japanese legal case.

One is constantly reminded that Noguchi and Kazu are older characters, though Noguchi is the more elderly. He has come to see his marriage as his final home, Mishima writes, and Kazu sees it as her tomb. "But people cannot go on living inside a tomb," the narrator's voice intones. 

When Noguchi takes Kazu to his family cemetery plot, and she encounters the grave of his first wife, we suddenly get a peek inside her head:

"Kazu had had no opportunity even at the wedding to meet the living members of Noguchi's family, but she could imagine how the dead ones with their high principles and absolute incorruptibility had transmitted the family's heritage to succeeding generations. Grinding poverty, obsequiousness, lies, contemptible natures - these were no concern of this family. Confused memories returned of obscene parties in country restaurants, of drunken customers thrusting their hands inside an innocent girl's kimono, of a runaway girl shrinking in terror as she boarded a night train, of back alleys in the city, of bought caresses, of petty ruses of every sort employed to protect herself, of the domineering kisses of cold-hearted men, of contempt mixed with affection, of a persistent craving for revenge against an unknown adversary: such experiences were surely undreamed of by this family."

Suddenly, we see Kazu has had a desperate fear of death, as though her life and its struggle would disappear into nothingness at the moment she leaves the earth. At one point in the book, Kazu realizes her possessions, symbolized by a vast collection of kimonos, is meaningless, and she feels "a desolation as if her flesh were suddenly melting away." By marrying a man of means and prestige, she has insured that one day she will buried among his family, her name finally having status and meaning. She perceives that death is the ultimate negation of her vital, emotional life. But by marrying, she has cheated her inevitable destiny.

She returns to the cemetery on election day, after lighting a candle before a Buddhist altar. She has a strange expectation that she can somehow woo the spirit of the former Mrs. Noguchi into bringing about an election victory supernaturally. Even the fact that mosquitoes are biting her is taken as a hardship, the endurance of which will bring about a reward.

"What do you say? Let's join hands, one woman to another, and help him win somehow." Kazu felt as if a beautiful friendship for this woman she had never met was rapidly materializing, and she wept a little. "What a fine lady, a fine lady. I am sure that if you were still alive we'd become good friends!"

Noguchi's defeat, which seems inevitable after a pamphlet reveals Kazu's notorious career for the voters, dooms the marriage. The couple cannot stay together because Noguchi had wanted a quiet retirement, while Kazu still longs for the Setsuogoan. In a decision much like Huck Finn's resolution to "go to hell" in helping a slave escape to freedom, Kazu chooses, in a sense, oblivion.

"There flashed before Kazu's eyes an unvisited grave in some desolate cemetery, belonging to someone who had died without a family...If Kazu were no longer a member of the Noguchi family, she would assuredly travel a straight road leading to that desolate grave...But something was calling Kazu for the distance. An animated life, every day wildly busy, many people coming and going - something like a perpetually blazing fire called her. That world held no resignation or abandoned hopes, no complicated principles; it was insincere and all its inhabitants fickle, but in return, drink and laughter bubbled up lightheartedly. That world seen from here looked like the torchlight of dancers scorching the night sky on a hilltop beyond dark meadows."

In this sense, Kazu is not very different from other "heroes" in the Mishima universe, for whom death is simply another, more final statement of life that adds a meaning, even if the meaning is meaningless. Like much of his audience, it is now that matters - knowing it will not last makes even the pain somehow sweet, in the sort of sad, philosophical sense that only a writer can believe. After the banquet, it is the hired help who cleans up after the celebrants. And the party becomes just another memory, if only for the sober.

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The Ghost of John Updike and the Boston Bombing

This weekend's capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers believed responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, brings up many questions. Time and investigation will tell whether the brothers were acting alone, had identified future targets, or were supported by means beyond their own.

But the episode also poses an obscure cultural question - will the events of last week and the coming weeks' vindicate one of John Updike's last, and least regarded, novels?

"Terrorist" was published in 2006, five years after the 9/11 attacks. It follows the life of a teenage Muslim American, Ahmad Mulloy, and his high school counselor, Jack Levy, along with a number of other characters in the forgotten American urban landscape of New Prospect, N.J.

The novel came at an interesting juncture in Updike's career. Long regarded as a possible Nobel Prize candidate, Updike's work landed in bookstores with the regularity of the seasons. Novels arrived every two years, in between short story collections, essay collections or poetry. His reputation was unassailable. But there was a feeling, hovering in the background, that Updike's suburbanite guilt-ridden adulterous Christian protagonists, swathed in his characteristically elegant prose, has grown way too precious. There was a feeling that the Master had become too detached from reality.

The first hints of this came after the triumph of "In the Beauty of the Lilies," still my favorite Updike. He followed this up with experimental works, such as "Toward the End of Time," a pseudo-science fiction work, "Gertude and Claudius," giving the backstory of "Hamlet," and "Seek My Face" and "Villages," workmanlike and occasionally perplexing examinations of the art world and the early days of computers. 

Next came assaults from outside. Updike's contemporary, Philip Roth, executed his late career renaissance with his celebrated American trilogy of "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain." And from the right came Tom Wolfe, fresh off "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man In Full." Wolfe, responding to criticism from Updike that his work was not literature, called Updike a "stooge" who had lost touch with his audience - a critique he didn't reserve solely for Updike but for most of the literati.

"Terrorist" is, in some ways, Updike's attempt to answer back. He fills the novel with as much modernity as he can muster - when he wrote the novel, there was still a lingering criticism that American writers had not fully engaged the ramifications of the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. (Something that still remains largely unattempted.)  And "Terrorist" is many things, but most of its main characters are not suburban middle-class people struggling to contain their hormones. It's possible to see the book as a combination of Roth and Wolfe - engaging American society while registering as many status details as possible.

The criticisms of the novel at the time, as I recall, were that Updike's Muslim, Ahmad, was not credibly rendered. Ahmad's mother, as well as Levy, come off as a stereotypes, as well as the novel's black characters. These criticisms are interesting when one considers that the characters of Roth's "The Human Stain" are almost all stereotypes, but it works. The sense we had at the time was that "Terrorist" didn't work. Taking it off the shelf, it took a few minutes to remember precisely what happened in the book.

The first line of the novel:

"Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God." 

Ahmad thinks of his teachers as weak Christians and nonobservant Jews who "make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint" but whose "shifty eyes and hollow voices betray their lack of belief." From the opening is established a critique - we see the world through Ahmad's eyes and we see America as a false, hypocritical place full of soul-destroying danger. 

It's also important to remember that 2006 was when the War on Terror began to take on a different shading. President George W. Bush, fresh off re-election, was no longer a unifying leader but was by now mortally wounded politically due to the aftermath of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. To many, we as a nation weren't in a generational global cultural conflict so much as replaying, in a Middle Eastern setting, our nation's continuing angst over Vietnam and presidential power.

That's why Updike's characters often fill "Terrorist" with liberal political critiques that sound more like a writer airing his frustrations than characters stating their views. It is this lapsing voice that is the novel's most frustrating problem. You find yourself admiring Updike's ambition in tackling the story at the same time you wish his execution was more exacting. When Ahmad's planned attack doesn't come off in the end, the reason, meant to be life-affirming and uplifting, instead feels false and unearned.

Ahmad in some ways fits what we know of the actual terrorists who have shown up in the past 20 years in America. Like their godfather, Sayyid Qutb, the 9/11 hijackers were not Islamic hermits who disengaged themselves from American culture. They were part of it - indeed the 9/11 hijackers conducted a meeting in Las Vegas weeks before the attack. It is the freedom of the culture that outraged them, even as they insinuated themselves into it. Ahmad doesn't square with what we know of the Tsarnaev brothers - Dzhokhar had a Twitter account much like any other, commenting on the movies and sports, and he was known to smoke pot. Ahmad's conduct seems naive, sheltered, abnormally sensitive. In this regard, he does not fit the profile - our real-life terrorists, at some crucial point, leave one with the lingering impression that their faith or the ideology is simply an excuse to inflict pain - ruthless, pitiless pain, on a grand scale.

There is an interesting scene involved Ahmad and Joryleen Grant, a black classmate who later becomes a prostitute. She undresses for him, talks to him, teases him, then sings "What a Friend We Have In Jesus." Is Ahmad being tempted by sex, or Christianity, or both and neither? It is this temptation, whatever it may be, which eventually inspires Ahmad to undertake his act of terrorism - in the end, violence is the only response when one succumbs, even in the mind, to temptation. That is the only way the true believer can earn redemption. At least this part seems true to life.

Updike's career will endure largely because of the length and depth of his talent and the character and quality of earlier novels. "Terrorist" is an interesting book, but it suffers in its critique for one reason at least - the reality it depicts wasn't born out later by events. Updike's depiction of the War on Terror has a disquieting moral equivalency between Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and America's reaction about it, and that reads less charitably after an event like the Boston Marathon attack and the city's response. Writing, perhaps with ideas of rendition, waterboarding, warrantless wiretaps and other causes in mind, Updike has one of his characters remark, "An open society is so defenseless. Everything the modern free world has achieved is so fragile."

If anything, the last week's events - senseless tragedy, national sympathy, patient police work, calm civic resolve - affirm that open societies are well-equipped to fight terror with the same freedom that inspires the attacks in the first place. Perhaps one of the flaws of our time is that we collectively expect something darker in our fiction to ring truer, darker even than evil that can strike in the most public places, when all we want to do is run.

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Mad Men: "The Doorway"

The sixth season of “Mad Men” opens in paradise, but Don Draper’s mind is in hell – he sits on a Hawaiian beach, Diamondhead in the background, reading the opening of Dante’s “Inferno:"

“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road, and awoke to find myself in a dark wood, alone…”

When last we saw Don, he was still recovering from the suicide of his business partner Lane Pryce, and finding his way after the departure of Peggy Olson for a rival agency. He spent the first year of his marriage seemingly committed to his second wife Megan, but we were left with the impression as the season ended that 1967 would see the end of his fidelity. And after a period of near failure, his advertising agency is finally beginning to assert itself as a player on Madison Avenue, following the firm’s securing an account with Jaguar. 

But what can we make of Don’s dipping into Dante? The answer comes at the end of the season opener, “The Doorway,” when we discover that Don has been having an affair with Sylvia, the wife of his neighbor, the heart surgeon Dr. Arnold Rosen.  “Did you read my Dante?” she asks, during their New Year’s Eve rendezvous. We understand from their dialogue that Don wants their affair to end, but he, of course, sought her out.

“The Doorway” is chiefly concerned with mortality, which you might expect from an episode that begins with the first lines of “The Divine Comedy.” Dante, in exile, writes of a supernatural encounter with the ghost of the classical poet Virgil, who then takes him on the beginning of a journey through Hell, Purgatory and, and eventually, Heaven. It is there that he will be reunited with his love Beatrice, and come face to face with God.  

As Don puts down his book on the beach, he notices his watch has stopped. Time has seemingly come to a standstill in paradise. But time is chiefly what Don and his coworkers are obsessed with. It is New Year, after all, the one time of life when we have no choice but to note its passage. There is Jonesy, the doorman for Don’s apartment building, who had a heart attack shortly before their trip and was saved by Dr. Rosen. There is Roger, who has to deal with the death of his mother after a long life. But time and mortality haunt Don, to the point where he can’t sleep and drinks so much that he vomits at the Sterling funeral, during a speech about what Mrs. Sterling’s life meant. 

These intimations of death have clearly gotten to Don (or is he still thinking about Lane’s death?) when he pitches an ad campaign using his Hawaii trip – and inadvertently leaves the impression of someone killing themselves. This references the very first episode of “Mad Men,” when Don struggled to come up with an ad campaign for Lucky Strike, knowing the product causes cancer. Roger comments on this:

“We sold actual death for 28 years with Lucky Strike. You know how we did it? We ignored it.”

In that first episode six years ago, Don said that advertising is a sign saying whatever you’re doing is okay. That’s perhaps what is being said throughout the episode – why do we take vacations to paradise? Why do we drink? Why do we worship? Because we know we will die, but as Dr. Rosen observes at episode’s end – “People do anything to alleviate their anxiety.” They want the sign by the side of the road assuring them that all is well. 

Don’s choice of reading material also reminds us of an earlier moment in the series. Don sent a copy of “Notes In the Middle of an Emergency” to Anna Draper, the wife of his dead namesake in season two. This was at a moment when Don began to grasp the loneliness of his double life, and the ethereal quality of his success. This time, however, it is a woman who has given him poetry.  

Dante’s work – our jumping off point – begins with a journey through Hell. John Ciardi, who translated “The Divine Comedy” says that the souls who find themselves in Dante’s Hell insisted upon it. “One must deliberately exclude himself from grace by hardening his heart against it. Hell is what the damned have actively and insistently wished for.” It is a hallmark of “Mad Men” that Don never stays happy for very long, that he seems insistent on melancholy. As Peggy told him last year, at the moment of the Jaguar triumph, he never seems to appreciate the good moments in life. 

There is also a spiritual subtext to “The Doorway,” much more vivid than is usually the case for “Mad Men.” (I continue to be amazed at how many times the characters refer to Jesus, and not just as a profanity.) For example, after his mother’s funeral, Roger feels moved to give his daughter a jar filled with water from the Jordan River. His father procured it on a business trip, and it baptized not only Roger but his daughter.

Peggy Olson deals with a work crisis while unable to get hold of her boss. We learn, through her end of a phone conversation with a pastor, that he seems to be on some sort of “religious retreat.” When he returns, he informs Peggy that his wife thinks he works too much. We also notice that Teddy is not the same character we were introduced to in the fourth season – a scheming, frustrated second-fiddle to Don Draper. He looks somehow content in a way that Don never seems, and that Peggy can’t seem to find either. 

 When Don meets Sylvia later, the camera pans across the bedroom to reveal a plastic mockup of a human heart – and a cross. And what day is it? Of course, it’s Sunday.  

But where the Inferno begins on Holy Thursday in the year 1300, “The Doorway” takes place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1967. “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year,” is the headline in The New York Times when Don returns to his apartment. What neither he nor anybody else can know is that they are about to enter the bloodiest year of the 1960s, the most turbulent, and the most dispiriting. The Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the riots, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the hints of absolute disorder are right around the corner. But the future always looks bright on the first day of the year. 

Jules Whitcover, in his book, “The Year The Dream Died,” tells us that 1968 was a nightmare. “It was the year when the sensitivities and nerve ends of millions of Americans were assaulted almost beyond bearing,” he writes, “and the hopes of other millions were buried beneath a wave of violence, deception and collective trauma unmatched in any previous January through December in the nation’s memory.”

Essentially 1968 was a paradox. After less than a decade of expanding civil rights, loosening social attitudes, and unprecedented prosperity and technical innovation, American society descended into chaos, leaving one with the impression that things were not moving toward a social utopia.  Where Don Draper’s generation may have felt a self-satisfaction at the pace of liberal American democracy, the younger, more radical left felt democratic pretensions were  a sham, and American consumerism a dead end. !968 offered a clash of these sentiments, and many others. Instead of paradise,  many were moved to remark, “This country is going to hell.” 

Perhaps “Mad Men” – and the journey of Don Draper – is “The Divine Comedy” in reverse. Don begins in the 1960s in Paradise. “Who couldn’t be happy with all this?” he asks Roger over a drink in his office in the show’s second episode. But he loses his marriage at the same moment he must build a firm from nothing. The season he spent building it, and rebuilding his life, could function as a kind of purgatory. But as Don sits on the beach reading Dante, we wonder if he’s learned anything from his journey. 

Dante’s Hell was not a metaphor to him, just as any man’s suffering is not an entertainment. But as the sign above the gates of Hell reminded the poet, what makes Hell hellish is its never-ending absence of hope. It remains to be seen what awaits Don Draper in the new year.

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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

To say “Gone Girl” is a love story would be truthful, but it would be truthful in the same way as saying Hannibal Lecter knows a lot about cooking.

“Gone Girl” is catastrophically romantic, as the character Nick Dunne says of his relationship with his wife Amy. It is a story of obsession, of love curdling into something very close to hatred, then metastasizing into obsession, domination and possession. But one is never really sure who is being possessed, who is obsessed, and where the line between love and hatred exists between Nick and his wife. And the book’s success over the last year can be traced to this hard center which lies at the heart of what might otherwise be only a well-crafted thriller.

Gillian Flynn’s novel uses the device of Nick telling the story of his wife disappearing, seemingly into thin air, one day after they have abandoned New York City for Nick’s hometown in Missouri. His chapters are immediately followed by one written by Amy, giving her side of their marriage. The couple’s move was brought on by the faltering economy, and a sudden change in fortune for the couple, who are both very skilled writers rendered unemployed by the recession and the changing publishing industry. Like many couples, moving unhinges the dynamics that have marked their still-developing marriage. Nick co-owns a bar with his sister Margo, and Amy is struggling to find herself in her new surroundings. But Amy has distinguished herself her whole life – the daughter of a husband-wife team of children’s book authors, their creation being an above average little girl named “Amazing Amy.”

Amy’s disappearance is the catalyst for some truths and some lies between the couple, and each has confessing to do within their pages. But we are conscious early on that Nick is not completely reliable with the truth, and neither is Amy, as we come to discover. Anyone who digests television news on a regular basis can spot the outlines of the story – a woman disappears and her husband quickly becomes the prime suspect. But by putting us in Nick’s (and Amy’s) head, the story doesn’t give us a Rashomon rehash of a marriage coming off the rails, but something else entirely. When the book abruptly changes gears mid-way through, the reader is by this time undeniably hooked.

Tricks? Of course. The couple’s words complement and contradict each other, with chapters ending at just the proper point to drive the reader forward. We know we are getting deeper and deeper into some very dark places, but we hardly care. The Dunnes aren’t a typical couple, by any definition, and they have some surprising things to say about the nature of love.

One theme of the book is genuineness. By taking us back through the beginnings of the Dunnes’ relationship, we see once again how two people assume roles in order to impress and attract the other. The act of courting allows a man and a woman to become, in someone else’s eyes, the person they have always wanted to be seen as. The past can be abandoned and ignored, or even discarded. We find ourselves longing for the artificial instead of the genuine, but the truth will out, as it always does.

But what about in our present world, where the line between the genuine and the artificial, or the genuine and the derivative, is always hard to spot? We live in a time where self-invention takes many virtual forms, but few concrete, tangible ones. Nick remarks on this about a third of the way into the book:

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

There is another aspect to the story – that of understanding, of appreciation, in the original sense of the word. When love begins in an emotionally immature or still developing person, it usually begins when one person believes the other person “gets them” – understands them on a level previously unknown by anyone else. Usually, this is a positive, and in places of “Gone Girl,” this holds true even for the Dunnes. But gradually, Amy and Nick want each other to fully “appreciate” who and what they are apart, and together. This is not necessarily a good thing at all. One can appreciate a caged lion in a very different way than appreciating one bearing down on you. Some knowledge is better appreciated from a safe distance through a veil of speculation, rather than feeling the full brunt and savagery of the information. 

And then, there’s love itself. In the final chapter of the book, Amy makes an observation:

“I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?...It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”

Since Christian love is supposed to be unconditional, there is a ready answer for this – what Amy is talking about isn’t total unconditional love, not between two people. Because total love is what makes the other “try to do the right thing.”  It is love that inspires action, even constant action, that keeps the lover tuned into what the beloved wants, and vice versa. What Amy is speaking of sounds suspiciously like an act, a pantomime, but it is a serious observation, because for human beings, undisciplined love is disastrous. It easily changes and warps out of love and into the acts that drive the Dunnes apart, together, and back again, over and over. 

“Gone Girl” puts the hook into the reader, and then slowly reminds him that even the clichés that riddle the evening news are embodied by real people, and sometimes the light shines on them to reveal how much larger – and smaller – we all are than the images we cling to, about ourselves and each other.

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'We didn't need dialogue...we had faces!'

"The Uncanny Valley" sprang to life by way of a magazine cover:

In a 2010 article, Forbes speculated that it wouldn't be too long before Hollywood began making new movies with old movie stars - dead movie stars, that is. Not too long after that, a tabloid story had George Lucas buying the rights to certain dead movie star's images in order to use them, via computer animation. Though this story came to nothing, there is still some buzz, every now and then, about seeing a "new" Humphrey Bogart movie, or a "new" Marilyn Monroe movie. Think about it - take an existing actor, superimpose the older actor's face onto the new, tinker with the voice, and suddenly, you can see what happened to Marilyn after "Some Like It Hot."

Of course, there are questions of taste to consider. But I was immediately struck by the image, and by the idea. Anybody who got my last novel, "Brilliant Disguises," knows how important the image of the face was in that book. This time, I was carried away by several ideas - for example, Hollywood replacing someone's natural face with the one it thinks you would rather see. It's the sort of thing Nora Desmond would understand:

Another, more obvious idea, is resurrection. This is the best Hollywood can do - a computer generated image, brought back to life, just on the slim hope you can relive a thrill, just for an instant. 

So my novel would be about an imaginary actor from the past, brought back to life, my only little version of "Frankenstein." But what to base him on? The Humphrey Bogart image obviously stuck with me, as did the role he was playing when he wore that famous white evening coat - Rick Blaine in "Casablanca." Umberto Eco observed that Casablanca does an almost mystical job of mixing a host of screen cliches into something fresh and totally captivating. But my story couldn't be about a Bogart character. Instead, I mixed in a little of that 50s icon who in many ways has been overshadowed by the intervening years - James Dean.

Like him, my character Buck Trapp would only make a handful of films - just enough to gain a cult following, and only enough so that a whole mythology might attach itself to him without any regard for who and what he actually was. Buck Trapp would encounter many of the 50s Hollywood benchmarks - westerns, religious epics, noir mysteries, even foreign films - and he would die violently, and all too soon.

But what to call his film? "The Uncanny Valley" is the name for a psychological phenomenon, the switch in your brain that tells you something that is supposed to look lifelike is not real. For any work of fiction to succeed, it must trigger the brain's "willing suspension of disbelief" - even though you know you're looking a series of still images projected on a screen, and you know those images are actors playing parts, you are willing to be lied to, on several levels, to be entertained. In the case of computer generated images though, especially those involving the human face, the closer an image gets to a real face, the harder it is to trick the brain into accepting it as "real." The Uncanny Valley is the distance between reality and fantasy, an expanse which seems small but can be vast. It also sounds like a mystery...

But "The Uncanny Valley" may also be the distance between the reality we perceive in our lives, and what others experience. We are often the poorest judges of who we are, where we're going, and what we're doing. Like many - too many - entertainers before him, Buck Trapp loses control of his life, forgetting the lessons he learned in a life before he was transformed into an idol unworthy of worship.

It is only when a present day actor, Newman Self, is asked to star in a sequel to Buck Trapp's greatest role that he tries to unlock the mystery of the earlier star's life, and learns what he lost. Resurrection, as the world practices it, is never permanent. But the journey to the land of the dead and back is always with us in life and literature, which is why there's a little bit of Orpheus thrown in our journey, mixed with bits from Mozart, and that other Resurrection which continues to dog our steps. And our movie is a little mixture of "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "Citizen Kane" thrown in for good measure.

And besides, who doesn't like the movies? The show's about to start...

To read an excerpt, click here. To order a copy, click here.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
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I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me

In this excerpt from "The Uncanny Valley," the actor Buck Trapp meets his costar Olivia Marks at a bar in the Chateau Marmont. He is also supposed to be meeting his director, Otto Heller. It is the 1950s in Hollywood, and Buck has spent several unpromising years in B movies after leaving his small town life, but understands this role could be his big break.

****

The first time Buck stared into the eyes of his future wife, she was very much the same as she had been when she had first arrived in Hollywood only four months before. He spotted it at a glance, because he understood the feeling. It was the same sensitivity to the stares of others that he had when he first came to the city. Then, Buck Trapp had been Bacchus Trapp - the unpolished country boy, who entered studio offices and arrived for screen tests and rehearsals convinced he would be sent back on the next train. He was afraid to say anything for fear of revealing his ignorance, and afraid of being too quiet. He smiled graciously because he had been taught to do so in adult company, but only a few stale words came from him until he understood that no one was, as yet, out to discover the terrible secret that he didn’t know what he was doing.

Olivia was the same, he felt. She still had that small town look on her face, the look of a girl teetering on a pair of heels she wasn’t used to wearing.

But she was gorgeous. That too was apparent. The studio hadn’t yet polished her, which was good because she didn’t possess that air-brushed, gauzy glamour look the studios cherished. The studios were corporations and they appreciated women who looked like corporations - attractive, aloof, dangerous and only vaguely human. There was something about her that reminded him of strawberries still on the vine, fresh and wet and deeply red. Her flesh was rosy and she looked as though she was blushing as she offered her hand. Though he didn’t notice what she was wearing, it was white and made her blonde hair shine. She glowed in the light hanging over their table.

“Are you Olivia?” he asked.

“You must be Mr. Trapp.”

“Buck, please. That’s me.” He held her seat until she sat back down.

“Well I must say. I’m feeling way under dressed.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m from the country. They tell you to get dressed up and you figure they mean it.” She laughed at him. It was a tantalizing laugh, because it meant she understood he was empathizing with her. Here they were, two kids who just happened to be in this place where they made moving pictures for a living. It meant they had to stick together. “You been here long?”

“No,” she said. “Well, yes. I got here thirty minutes ago. I was afraid of being late.”

“What are you drinking there?”  

“Water. I wasn’t about to start drinking anything stronger. I was afraid I might blow the whole thing.”

She was careful. And smart. Buck thought to himself that perhaps she hadn’t been picked to come here to Hollywood, like he had, but had sought this life out. And maybe she wasn’t afraid to show weakness to him.

So he would try flattery. “You’ve been at this awhile, haven’t you?”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

“Really? That’s quite impressive. I would have thought, since you have that much figured out, that you had been in town at least a year or so…”

Her expression changed, and Buck felt, for some reason, that he had overplayed his hand. “They probably told you I just got into town a few months ago, Mr. Trapp. But I guess you’ve been at this thing awhile, haven’t you?”

Now he felt like he was blushing. He motioned for the waiter and fiddled with the flower in his lapel and stammered out the only response he could think of. “That’s right. They said this was your first picture.” He was careful to avoid her eye.

“This is your seventh, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Oh, come now,” she said. She had education, at least. Probably better than most. She seemed older than he had been told.

“I’m not joshing. I’ve lost count. I’d like to forget some of the ones I’ve been in.”

“I’ve probably seen one of your pictures.”

“Bet you haven’t.”

“Bet I did. Name them.” Her tone was of the schoolyard know-it-all spoiling for a fight.

Buck recited the list. When he got to “The Dead Don’t Mourn,” the one where he played a Caribbean tourist in an unlikely voodoo trance, she pointed at him. “I remember that one.”

“Go on. You don’t.”

She put her arms out, bulged her eyes, and performed a passable impersonation of his trance. “Let me sleep,” she said, like the undead herself, and he knew instantly she had seen it.

“Incredible! I wasn’t aware anyone paid to sit through that.”

“Oh yes. My girlfriends and I did three times. We love scary pictures.”

“Lord. I’ll never be able to work with you now. Of all the things for you to see…”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad. It was quite entertaining. You were very good in it.”

“You think so?”

“I remember it, don’t I?”

“There’s that. I forget sometimes about how many of these things they’re turning out every week. Like I told you, it’s easy sometimes to forget what you’ve been in. That was the one I wanted to forget.”

“That’s your worst? That’s probably better than a lot of people in this town.”

Usually, it took the new ones awhile to realize that the waiters, waitresses, bellhops, mechanics, taxi drivers, dancers and store clerks around town who populated the backgrounds of every public place had usually once been would-be actors off the train from Somewhere Else, with expectations of box office glory that lasted only so long. That explained the blank stares and long faces.

He laughed, taking out a cigarette case. “Listen,” he said, his eyes still avoiding hers, “I’m sorry about that earlier.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to think I was snowing you. Buttering you up.”

She smiled the kind of grin he had seen on the faces of mothers when he came to pick up their daughters for dates. A knowing recognition of danger, mixed with an appreciation of boyish charm. There was even a little longing, he could hope, mixed in. “You’ve got a reputation, Mr. Trapp.”

“It’s Buck, please. Do I?”

“I’ve been warned about you, let’s just say that.” Her smile wasn’t disappearing. There was a little self-regard there, and some embarrassment. She probably felt like she was holding some of the cards, but not all of them. “It’s no big deal though. I’m a big girl, even if I’m new in town. I want this picture to work just as badly as you do.”

“I respect that. I really do.” He was patting his jacket for his lighter, then his pants’ pockets, when she produced a lit match. He puffed away and then thanked her.

“You smoke?”

“No,” she said, and blew out the match.

“I’ll admit, I was wrong about you. When I saw you, I thought you were green.”

“Easy?”

“Not the same thing. Can I call you Olivia?”

“Sure thing, Buck. Is that your real name?”

“It is now. No, I mean, when I saw you, I thought you one of those types that need helping. Shelter.”

“I’m a type?”

“I mean, well, you know what I mean.”

“You thought I couldn’t wait to run into those big strong arms of yours and find relief.”

He winced as he drew a puff from the cigarette. “Where’s my drink?”

“You haven’t ordered one yet.” She was really good. Too good, in fact. He was wondering if she might not chase him off the set.

She was quiet for a second as he began picking flakes of tobacco from his tongue. Then he gestured again for the waiter.

“Listen, maybe I should apologize,” she said. “I just met you, Buck. I feel like I’m already fighting it out with you. I am a little nervous. I’m probably trying to hide it.”

He smiled and laughed generously. At least he thought he sounded that way. “Don’t worry about it.” He put both palms up, as though surrendering. He would try to regain some of his position, hopefully get control of this conversation before she wrestled it away from him again. “I have a sister. Our conversations are a lot like this sometimes.”

“Younger or older? What’s her name?”

“Diana. She’s five years younger than me. Smarter than me too. What about you?”

“Yeah, I figure I’m probably smarter than you,” she said. When he realized what she had said, they both convulsed into laughter.

“You know, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun on this shoot,” he said. He reached across and gave her hand, resting on the table, a pat. That was all. Just a touch. He couldn’t gauge any reaction from her. “When did you find out they wanted you for this picture?”

“Got the call a couple of days ago. Mr. Heller called me himself. To tell the truth, I could barely understand what he was saying.”

“Don’t worry. You spend enough time around him, he starts making sense. Then you start speaking with the accent.”

She smiled again, only this time, he thought he detected her trying deliberately not to laugh. “When did you find out?”

He coughed. “Well, they wanted somebody else at first, but he was unavailable.”

“Don’t sound so sad,” she said. “I’m sure they would have wanted you just as much.”

The words did many things to him. He was touched by the almost maternal tone in her voice. But his pride was wounded because she felt she needed to reassure him. Not wounded much, but he still felt as though she was in control.

“Where did they say Otto was?” he said finally, putting the cigarette out when he was only halfway done. He stubbed the butt out as though it had personally offended him.

“They said he telephoned ahead to say that he was running late,” she said. Then her voice dropped a little above a whisper. “But I think Mr. Heller is that gentleman sitting right over there at that table. The one who isn’t reading that newspaper.”

Buck glanced over. There was a bald headed man in sunglasses, and he indeed held a paper at an odd angle which made it hard to believe he was reading it. Especially by the light of the lamp over his table. Though he only knew Otto from reputation, he was pretty sure the joker was wearing a false beard.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” he said. “What do you think we should do?”

“What do you think he would do if we left? Just now. Just got up and walked out?” Her face had no smile on it, just a tempting, teasing look that he recognized from his sister, though with an added refinement. She didn’t look like she was prepared to ignore everything he said, just yet.

“Let’s do it. If I keep waiting for that guy at the bar, I’m going to die of thirst.” He grabbed her water glass and drained it of what was left before she might protest. He then leapt up in a deft move and withdrew her chair as she rose. She thanked him with a breathy, voiceless move of the lips and the two of them began walking out of the bar. They did not look in Heller’s direction. They let him draw his own conclusions.

Without thinking it through, the two walked to the hotel elevator. When the doors opened, the two of them expected a hotel man to be there to push the buttons for guests, but there was no one. The two glanced at each other as they got on. Olivia pressed the button for the eleventh floor. After a second, Buck pressed the nine button.

“What’s your room?” he asked. “Hope you don’t think I’m forward.”

She named the room. I don’t think you’re forward. But my door is going to be locked, Buck.”

“What a coincidence. I’m exactly two floors below you.” The passing of each floor was indicated by a bell.

“Nice to know.”

“And my door is going to be locked too,” he added, smiling in self-satisfaction. The elevator doors opened.

“Good. But if I were you, I’d pay attention.”

“To what?”

“To the fact that this is your floor.”

He looked over and saw a large brass “9” hanging in the wall just beyond the double doors.

“Well, I guess this is good night,” he said. He carried the same expression as a child who has just learned his mother isn’t taking him to the park today. It was as if he suddenly realized her ploy to leave the director behind also involved getting rid of him. He stepped from the car as though he half expected her to follow him. The seconds passed for Buck like stones heaved from the top of a tall building. She hardly even twitched in his direction.

“Good night then,” she smiled.

Then Buck stepped forward to hold the elevator. “Of course, we do need to get to know more about each other, so we can have a good relationship on screen.”

“That’s true, but I think that’s why Otto wanted us together with him. I’d feel something wasn’t right if we cooked up something on our own.” Her voice sounded so innocent, as though she had no idea that men and women occasionally were alone together in varying states of intimacy. But when he looked in her eyes, he saw something else. She was reveling in this! She wanted to see him abase himself.

“Well, you shouldn’t trust the director too much to know what he wants. That’s why they hire us,” he said, with the sound of a man who has toiled in a business so long he knows all the ins and outs.

“We’ve got plenty of time to fill in the details,” she said.

His mind, working feverishly now, understood the rest of her plan. She had arranged the whole thing. Otto would believe that the two of them went off and figured out which room to spend the night in together. Then it would put the director’s fears about casting chemistry to an end, as well as frustrate Buck’s momentary interest in her.

Because, he did have to admit to himself – now he was very intrigued by this woman. He desperately wanted to impress her somehow, but he seemed to be growing steadily more unsure of whether this was possible.

So he stepped forward again and stopped the car, just as the doors were about to close again. The doors noisily buffeted his hard body.

“You want me to say it?”

“Say good night? You already did.” Again, the voice was innocent, almost ignorant, while the eyes were steely and arrogant.

“No. I mean. Well…”

“Yes?”

“Surely we can’t just end up this way?”

“There’s always tomorrow, Buck,” she said. Somehow, the fact that she used his first name thrilled him.

“But what about now?” he asked.

“You ever read the Bible, Buck?” she said.

He nodded, and had another understanding - she had perfectly sized him up, right down to the country boy who was born and bred in a pew.

“Be as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves. Good night.” The greeting was nearly cut off by the closing doors.

“You haven’t heard the last of me,” he said, and he really wished she could have heard him say it. 

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