The Betrothed

An unbeliever reads a canonical religious novel

Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, published in its final form in 1842, is the foundational Italian novel, has the rare distinction of being a work that standardized a language, is assigned reading in the writer’s native country, and I’ve barely ever heard anyone mention it. Michael F. Moore’s translation, from 2022, was the first in English in about 50 years. In his introduction, he speculates about the reasons behind this neglect: It’s long, over 600 pages. And it’s religious, which I was unaware of when I chose to give it a go. Sounds right to me. Every canonical 19th century writer who remains relatively popular in English that I can think of has estimable books of an approachable length that aren’t nearly so steeped in religion as this one is. As a boy I was baptized as a Catholic and, in my early years, taken to church. I’ve never been more bored in my life. One Sunday, my mother came downstairs and asked us if we were going to get ready to attend services. My father, brothers, and I exchanged looks. And we never joined her again. Lapsed, to say the least. As an adult I made it official, deciding I was an unbeliever, an atheist with anti-theist sympathies, stoked further in recent years by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Narendra Modi and the BJP, the Taliban. A stout democracy, the best system we’ve got until something better comes along that hasn’t already been discredited by accurate history or the daily reports on today’s various antidemocratic regimes, is one that’s, among other things, secular. (Otherwise: consider the above examples, to start with.) This year I read a piece by Joy Williams in Harper’s in which she says, without support, that people who aren’t believers are “timid and middling.” Rather than recapitulate the many arguments against it I’ve picked up through the years, none of which, as far as I can tell, evince those qualities, I simply thought: I don’t feel the presence of god. I feel no void that god might fill. And I can’t bring myself to spend time I don’t have forcing the issue. (Yet I don’t see the need to make a sweeping generalization about the personal attributes of the believer.) Frankly, had I known The Betrothed would be so religious, it’s possible I would have put off reading it for another time, thinking it would have more appeal to an observant Catholic. Soon after I started, however, I became absorbed.

Renzo and Lucia, two young peasants from an unnamed village circa 1628, are on the verge of getting married. Don Rodrigo, a noble with a gang of thugs at his disposal and no fear of the law, decides he wants Lucia for himself, to do with as he pleases. He sends his men to intercept the priest who’s scheduled to marry them, Don Abbondio, and threaten him to put off the wedding indefinitely. Don Abbondio cravenly complies, pretending to take ill. From then on, the obstacles to (holy) matrimony keep coming. In telling this story, Manzoni’s reach extends to every rung of society. Men and women, rich and poor, devout or not all get their say. He roves from backwater to big city. He alternates fluidly between distance, providing the reader with relevant history of the period, and closer study of the travails of his characters’s lives, with a sense of comedy or tragedy, as the situation demands. Working on such a large scale, one would expect superfluous material, loose ends, some difficulty keeping names straight. But the novel is remarkably controlled too: the plot is easy to follow and digressions are purposeful and kept to a minimum. No doubt this is a result of the additional time the writer spent tweaking it and also, I’d argue, a measure of self-consciousness. Wherever a structural flaw may appear, such as during stretches to cover background information, the narrator interjects to comment on the flaw, to demonstrate his awareness of it and reassure the reader that there’s a point or that we’ll be returning to the main story shortly. Sit tight.

Nevertheless, some flaws do escape Manzoni’s notice. For instance, given the title of the book, one would think the love story would be imbued with more feeling. But Renzo and Lucia are missing an element of personality, the strange and unpredictable side of the self, which is almost entirely reserved for minor characters and always manifests as a quirk to poke fun at in a few rather than accept as discernible in all. So they’re more like peasant types and no scene strongly establishes their particular connection. The delayed marriage’s primary function, then, is to set the book in motion. Real potency lies in the way Manzoni acutely shows people coming to religion and struggling with the word of god. My favorite character, Fra Cristoforo, humble saintly figure with humble lifestyle, tirelessly dedicated to protecting the poor, is the subject of one of the book’s best sections. In his youth, he gets into a dispute with a nobleman over who should move aside for whom on the sidewalk. A fight breaks out. One of the men he’s closest to gets mortally wounded defending him and he, in turn, mortally wounds the nobleman. The young man, shaken by both deaths, vows to give his life over to the church, adopting the name of his fallen comrade, Cristoforo. His first act is to visit the nobleman’s family and beg for their forgiveness. Back then, some donned the cloth to escape justice, so he enters their home under suspicion. But Cristoforo’s act of abasement, the sincerity of his guilt, moves them, dissipating the family’s bloodthirstiness. Fra Cristoforo discovers his path and starts off by ending the cycle of violence. I didn’t need to be further convinced of his piety or legendary status in the community.

The Betrothed may be labeled as a historical novel but I think Manzoni does something that’s more interesting: it’s a meta-historical novel. He never lets the reader forget that his story derives from particular sources. And he comments on those sources, from the authoritative to the speculative (he suspects that Renzo is chiefly responsible for preserving his own story). He’s even openly skeptical of his approach: “Well, what exactly he did no one knows, since he was alone, and history can only guess. A practice, luckily, to which history is accustomed.” It would lead Manzoni, finally, to reject his masterwork. Not that it seems to have hurt its reputation. Manzoni doesn’t try to transport the reader to another time and still manages to incorporate history to expand the novel’s scope. He provides the text of the law and contrasts it with how infrequently it’s upheld in practice, especially on behalf of the poor. He delineates government policy, such as that which leads to a famine, and, with exasperation, the illogic of the masses and the reckless decisions made to appease them. (Here, the future politician speaks up, and one that is perhaps not a fierce proponent of democracy.)

And he shows the calamitous effect of the plague on society at large. I don’t recall the Betrothed mentioned in any list of books to read to understand our recent pandemic but it does offer a discomfiting lesson: 400 years later, hardly anything changed. Public health experts attempt to warn about the dangers of the disease. The people respond initially with “dumb and deadly confidence.” Then it starts to kill off whole families and panic spreads. The experts take measures to contain the spread of disease. The people resist. Meanwhile, superstition and conspiracy theory lead to misguided fear and senseless acts of violence against imagined perpetrators. Experts are threatened and forced to act based on whatever seems to mollify the public: “Good sense did indeed exist, but it stayed hidden for fear of common sense.” As a result, scores of people die. This resembles what occurred in countries like the US and Manzoni sides with those in power (even as he compassionately describes suffering and death). Ian Johnson, however, writing about the Chinese government’s response to the pandemic in his recent book Sparks, emphasizes the abuses of those in power: from detaining an apolitical ophthalmologist for warning his friends about a disease going around and forcing him to sign a statement that doing so is illegal to harsh lockdown measures once the government decided to publicly acknowledge the danger and persecution of those who eventually protested against them. I’m not confident that the ideal balance between responsiveness and decisiveness will be struck next time. Despite advances in medicine and technology, Manzoni’s book is an early example of what we already know can easily happen to us in the same situation: chaos.

A difference: Back then, they didn’t have healthcare workers dealing with the worst cases. They had priests who, in Manzoni’s telling, risk their lives to serve others. A heroic act, one of many they perform—so many that I’m prompted to ask: Is the novel religious propaganda? It takes place within a context of religious belief, where it’s an unquestioned good. But the church has its gray shades, seen in authority figures who don’t exemplify the highest virtues: Don Abbondio, the Signora. Even Renzo has to be guided back from conduct that’s unworthy of his religion to meet Fra Cristoforo’s approval. Although Cardinal Borromeo, another legendary figure, is revered by the narrator even after noting that he would go on to endorse burning “witches” at the stake. Manzoni’s defense: nobody’s perfect.

I look forward to the day The Betrothed becomes a permanent part of my library. For its aesthetic merits.

Well, That's It For "Weird"

On switching to "eldritch" this election season

Two writers, Jessica Bennett of the New York Times and Scaachi Koul of Slate, express approval for Democrats finally going "low" and hurling insults at their opponents. They hope that the trend continues. And they especially enjoy the unrestrained use of “weird,” in the pejorative sense. For a few reasons, I don’t share their enjoyment.

The most obvious is that, in their enthusiasm, they use the word so much that I'm already sick of it. Here’s Bennett:

Weird and creepy. Simple, gut-punching words. Not a threat to democracy or a menace to the “soul of America,” not even “dangerous.” Nope, in the progressive vernacular of the moment, Mr. Trump and his party are just a bunch of weirdos, making weird policy proposals, weird comments about women, weird fashion choices and weirder shoe choices and promoting even weirder conspiracies. And of course, as any sixth grader who’s been called weird — or worse, “creepy” — by his peers knows, good luck trying to argue your way out.

I cringe at the thought of how many times we’ll hear it leading up to election day, with inordinate self-satisfaction despite the manifest unoriginality and schoolyard source. Unless it’s murdered by overuse before then. A sorry fate for a noble and versatile word.

Bennett recites all the crude insults rightwingers have been hurling for years ("snowflake," "cuck," etc.). I don’t recall my feelings ever having been hurt even slightly by them. Still, they mean to be insulting so it would only be fair to send insults right back at them. I endorse the use of insults, when appropriate. In such situations, though, one would prefer not to resort to: "I know you are but what am I?" That is, one should aim for a higher grade of insult: clever, cutting. "Weird" is not that insult. Nor is another word both writers approve of, "creepy." They're common and already brandished frequently by those who don't know more than 100. If you’re punched in the gut by words like these into adulthood, your short time on Earth will be miserable. Someone who, for instance, is quiet, not sociable enough for others can expect to hear whispers (or shouts) of "weird" and "creepy." (So I’ve heard.) Someone who dresses eccentrically can expect the same. Someone who deviates from the norm in any way, really, can expect the same. As insults, they're about as meaningful and carefully deployed as "asshole" or "retard," two other schoolyard classics for the unlettered. A limited vocabulary fosters inaccuracy. Koul, for instance, describes JD Vance, the perfect foolish Trump running mate, and his attacks on no-fault divorce as "weird." Can’t say that does justice to how revolting and wildly irresponsible it is to suggest that women should be forced to stay with a violent partner.

Koul and Bennett both subscribe to a binary I reject, at least as they frame it. To remain "high," one is required to endure insults with stoic silence or earnest pleas to keep it respectful. But who keeps it respectful in this hostile world? In my experience, insults can and will fly casually anywhere, anytime, unprovoked: grocery stores, bus rides, weddings, restaurants, classrooms, medical care facilities, on the road, in your neighborhood, in your driveway. Anyone who does a customer service job has a chance of getting verbally assaulted while assisting someone. Then there's the internet: when the insults aren't direct, indirect insults will come barely concealed in the form of innuendos, trolling, gaslighting. In such circumstances, what the writers and others consider "low," responding with harsh or derisive language (or, I’d add, considered nonverbal acts of rudeness), is a legitimate form of self-defense. I’m not going to subtract points or assign a technical foul simply for going there, especially when we’re so often there already. When I think of times I’ve chosen the disputable “high” option, it was either because I was caught off guard or because sometimes it feels dirty and wasteful to respond to every single fool who comes along. (Although it may be too much to hope that they’ll even vaguely sense the truth: that they’re beneath response.) I’m also cool with insults when the ideas proposed are abhorrent and sure to cause unnecessary pain to others. Which means, in some instances, one has no right to complain when the insults are returned. The real low, then, is throwing around witless, unjust, and/or ill-timed insults. (As long as I’m defining the boundaries, using chicanery, intimidation, or literal bloodshed to settle the argument is so low as to be disqualifying.)

Koul goes so far as to insist that Trump is “funny.” The first words I think of to describe Trump are: Rapist (or, if the right would prefer, “sexual assaulter”). Traitor. Twice-impeached felon. Business genius with multiple bankruptcies who didn’t get anywhere without daddy’s money and influence. Fan of dictators who, with help from the rightwing Supreme Court, threatens to be a dictator. And, as a recent appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention proved once more, a racist and a moron. There’s a lifetime’s worth of insults in this brief summary. But, as Trump admitted to those journalists, all it takes to offend him are the facts.

Studies in Ridonculousness: Always Be Going Out On an Explosion

 King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007)

The documentary King of Kong remains a favorite of mine. It’s about a battle for Donkey Kong arcade game supremacy, waged between Billy Mitchell, whose high score has stood for decades, and Steve Wiebe, challenger to the throne. This pursuit is certainly strange, like everything about this subculture. Take arcade game scorekeeping: one man volunteers to spend numberless hours of his life watching tapes of video game record submissions. (To maintain the integrity of the system, someone must be responsible for making sure the gamer didn’t cheat or doctor the tape.) Strange but not ridonculous.

The first couple of times I watched it, I only picked up on the comedy, which is abundant. This time I admired a quieter part of the movie, the filmmaker’s sketch of Wiebe: Husband. Father of two. Laid off the day his family moves into a new home. Later he becomes a high school biology teacher. Intelligent, unassuming, softspoken, with a varied skill set and friends and family that cheer him on. But he’s also somewhat fragile, thwarted, having struggled to meet expectations in some ways: a modern day George Eliot character. He’s decent, doesn’t appear to be the least inclined to use dirty tricks to get ahead. He perfects his Donkey Kong game honestly.

And when he finally achieves his high score, can finally say his hours of work? have led to an indisputable success, however small, he slowly comes to learn that he isn’t dealing with an altogether fair system run by professionals operating with the utmost scrupulousness. As his score gets attention, some arcade gamer goons break into his house and take apart his Donkey Kong machine, to inspect it. Finding no definitive proof that he cheated somehow, his score is ultimately rejected simply because he sent in a tape. A decision is reached partly due to the influence of the record holder himself, Billy Mitchell, the superstar of this world. However, Wiebe is offered the chance to “redeem himself” by spending time and money flying across the country to achieve the same high score on a public machine, amongst witnesses. He makes the trip. (Meanwhile, his wife is stressed because she has to take care of the kids alone for the weekend.) Another goon is there and tries to psych him out. I thought, charitably, of basketball: part of the game involves taunting and trashtalking and worming into an opponent’s head. It’s not a dirty tactic. It can add to the fun. And it’s another challenge for the baller to overcome. And there’s yet more fun to be had when it backfires and the trashtalker goes sliding across the court and into a player’s highlight reel. Then the counterthought: This isn’t basketball. I doubt I could watch Mario jumping over barrels for four quarters. Still, when Steve Wiebe gets a kill screen (…no explanation forthcoming), I laughed to see the goon swallowing the shame of failing to get a kill screen before him. But Weibe’s efforts (and time and money) are worth little after Billy Mitchell sends in a tape of himself achieving the highest score and is roundly applauded.

A snapshot of Steve Wiebe, near the documentary’s close: Splashing around in a pool with his kids on his shoulders. Wherever he ends up ranking in Donkey Kong, he’s not ridonculous (or no more than most of us, anyway). He’s won even if he’s lost.

It's Billy Mitchell specifically who proves with every moment he’s onscreen that he belongs in this column. Unapologetically admitting that he’s a controversial figure, he compares himself to the abortion debate. An elderly woman tasked with delivering his high score tape describes him as “devious.” At the airport, Mitchell tells her the tape is more important than her luggage and it’s probably not a joke. When he eventually appears in person, hovering in the background, Wiebe politely greets him and he maintains stony silence: mustn’t greet a rival in the Donkey Kong game. When asked what initials he inputs into the machine after getting a high score, he tells the person to guess by looking at him. The offscreen wag says: “TIE?” (Mitchell likes his loud ties.) Without cracking a smile, Mitchell gives the answer: to thumb his nose at his “Canadian and Latin” friends, he always inputs the letters USA.

He has one peer: Vanilla ICE. Both based in Florida, incidentally.

 

 

Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017)

The eighth entry in the FF series is comparable to Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1: a franchise-killer that inspires one to shout as the credits roll that the filmmakers need to WRAP THIS UP! Both movies revel in ridonculousness. Both perfunctorily dispatch women characters that hardly had a place in the universe of the franchises to begin with merely to give the male hero a reason to fight evil once more, spoiling any fun one might have been having up to that point. Both are too long. Both wear out their formulas, devolving into self-parody. Both feature none too compelling technology-run-amok plots. Both are humorless (though not for lack of trying). The difference in Fate is that it features a twist out of a wrestling script: the good guy goes bad. And this time there’s a submarine. What was it all for? Doing my best worst Vin Diesel, I’ll state what the concluding message of the next seven movies (including spinoffs) in the FF franchise is going to be: FAMILY (which will include, by the end of the series, all the clones of star fleet captain Dominic Toretto, President of Earth).

 

Madame Web (SJ Clarkson, 2024)

A high-profile bomb, so infamous that it fascinated people outside the circle of aficionados. Going back to my elementary school years and drawing on my memories of the Spiderman cartoon (and, to a lesser extent, the comics), the title character, played understandably without full commitment, and a trace of confusion, by Dakota Johnson, is obscure in the Marvel Universe. An odd choice for a potential franchise, although it provides a number of starring roles for women. The movie is about Madame Web’s origin: gaining the power to see into the future and becoming the boss of a squad of teen superheroes.

Bland, clunky, nonsensical, not easy on the eyes—promising, in other words. In one baffling scene, the girls disobey an order to hide in a forest, for their safety, and wander into a nearby restaurant. Without ordering anything, they head over to meet a group of boys and within moments are dancing on their table. No manager asks them to please stop. The other patrons barely even seem to notice. It isn’t amusing. It isn’t plausible. This is just what the movie thinks teen girls, practically strangers to each other, would do in this life-threatening situation.

In gathering these girls, Madame Web is wanted for kidnapping. First of all, it’s another reason why the table dance makes no sense: they’re drawing attention to themselves while on the run from the law. But soon, Web has to leave the country, alone. Despite her face being in the newspaper for a major crime, she gets out – meeting a man who pops out of some bushes in the Amazon – and back in with such ease that there isn’t a single scene in the airport.

Above all, a superhero movie is supposed to have action and, on that basis alone, this one deeply underwhelms. The supervillain is about as generic as he can possibly be without wearing jeans and a white t-shirt that reads “supervillain,” written in Sharpie. He dresses sort of like Spiderman only with muddier coloring, moves around basically like Spiderman, but is devoid of personality. He has one henchwoman, an assistant with no superpowers (and also no personality) who monitors the entire city for him by herself using a bank of screens, seemingly without rest for weeks, to locate the girls amid, I’m guessing, hundreds of thousands of people. To give a sense of the quality of his dialogue, during the final battle, as the supervillain is about to die, he says: I’m not even going to type it. I know you know what he says. One word, not vulgar. Come on.

No matter how bad these superhero movies are, they’ll always end on the hopeful note of a potential sequel. If I was left somewhat disappointed, it’s because, while consistently terrible, in every conceivable way, it doesn’t go over the top enough. I couldn’t laugh off my turkey-induced headache.

 

Under Paris (Xavier Jens, 2024)

The lesson I learned with this one is to doublecheck the Rotten Tomatoes score before viewing. I could’ve sworn this was in the 80s. So when I decided to watch it, it was with the vague understanding that it was supposed to be good. With more reviews tallied, however, it wound up in the 60s. And even that’s too generous. In hindsight, I should have been more skeptical that there can be much more to add to the shark monster movie subgenre after Jaws besides absurdity. In any case, it has its moments, at least.

An unintentional warning is provided in the opening set piece, involving the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A group of scientists diving underneath it are mauled by a giant shark that looks too digital to elicit any real scare, the lack of suspense or visual flair further highlighting the artificiality. Years later, back in Paris, one of the survivors, Sophie, played by Bérénice Bejo, continues to suffer from the trauma of that day. She’s leading a tour at an aquarium. In this scene, the movie’s crude characterization, its low opinion of humanity, is made clear: A suspiciously well-informed boy jeers her about her dead colleagues, prompting laughter among the other kids. Then he goes so far as to delight in her tears. And no teacher or chaperone attempts to intervene, hisses a single word. Combined with the opening, I thought I was safe to forget the Charles Darwin quotation that starts the movie.

…I suppose I went ahead and tossed out even more while I was at it, since I can’t remember why her old nemesis, the giant shark, finds its way to Paris, to take up residence in and around the Seine. But it’s there and a tracker placed on it by the scientist still works, so she can monitor its movements on her laptop. Not that it does anything to stop the shark’s rampage. The movie implies that it somehow kills an entire group of homeless men standing near the water. They all fell into the water? An incredibly stupid activist is so sure that she can direct the shark to the ocean before the authorities hunt it down that she gathers a group of people in the shark’s lair to watch her make contact and document it for promotional purposes. Her screaming death, a goofy overhead shot of her halfway down the shark’s gullet, is worth a hearty laugh, and again when the shot is repeated near the end. The incredibly stupid, callous mayor, busy planning a triathlon with a swimming section to be held in the Seine, shows nothing but contempt for the experts and their warnings just because some people were slaughtered there recently. The triathlon continues as planned.

The one surprise disappointment with the final massacre is that the mayor falls into the water but apparently is spared. The very end, though, patient viewer, compensates for that missed opportunity with another surprise: it’s not enough that the shark just attacks and feeds. There are live explosives in the water, left from WWII. Gunmen fire their machine guns at the shark. Since the general rule for movie machine guns is that they almost never hit the intended target, the shark slips away to prepare for the sequel while the bullets hit the explosives, causing a chain reaction that blows up the Seine and leaves Paris underwater. 

Under the Volcano

     Among all the writers whose biographies I’ve looked into, I’d nominate Malcolm Lowry as least likely to get a fucking thing done. He drank to scary excess, went through a doomed marriage, lived precariously (though without supporting himself financially), and more than once wound up in a mental hospital. The documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976) is mostly devoted to the gruesome side, with readings from his work interspersed, and visual choices and dour musical accompaniment that occasionally strain to achieve a grotesque effect. And though it benefits from being filmed early enough to include people who knew him in different stages of his life, it doesn’t make use of the quite helpful convention of identifying them by displaying their names and some words on their relationship to the writer, so that one has to figure it out or accept accounts from nameless witnesses. But most of all it fails to give equal attention to his inspirations and the work he must have put in to write his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), that is the only reason this documentary exists in the first place. Not salacious enough, perhaps. Nevertheless, with him I’m particularly interested in how he managed it. We learn something crucial about the process: his second wife, Margerie Bonner, to whom the book is dedicated, deserves more recognition for her involvement. It wasn’t just invaluable companionship and encouragement that continued after the novel was initially rejected by 12 publishers. She edited the book alongside him. She even saved the manuscript when their home burnt down. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. Finally seeing a modest novel in print would have been enough to qualify as a success. A few good reviews would have seasoned it. This man, who was at constant risk of damaging his mind irreparably with alcohol and endless self-flagellation, who might have died under a moldering heap of notes, drafts, diaries, and bottles in one foul setting or another practically unknown, writes a brilliant, all-encompassing novel, the power of which is sustained over close to 400 pages without letup, that’s never been out of print and that makes him a legend.

It takes place in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, 1938. Lowry’s method is to pour his own life in, more or less: the main character is the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, a man destroying himself with alcohol. He has bouts of madness. Somewhere there’s a manuscript lying around. He’s visited by his estranged wife, who’s there to save the marriage. This would suggest support for the trite notion that we all have at least one book in us, which in my experience hasn’t died. Actually reading a book like this should dispel it: Under the Volcano is Lowry’s dissolute, tumultuous life coupled with a rare, dazzling command of an array of literary techniques. The smooth flow between internal and external, mental babel and immediate surroundings. A fine-grained, expansive vision of Mexico that avoids both the simple foreigner’s distance and horror and the temptation to narrowly focus on one man’s disastrous life. His feel for the resonance of a scene, for the morsel of an image or detail. (No life is enough if one doesn’t remember or know what to select or how to embellish.) His ear for voices, including broken English that doesn’t travesty the speaker. His language: vigorous, multilingual, maximalist—in sentence and paragraph length, metaphor, lexicon, allusions, sources (advertisements, menus, letters).

And his humor! Which caught me by surprise at first because I thought that, given his subject, he’d be sure to shed a few too many tears in his mescal. Not so.

The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers.

In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men…The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance.

Don Quixote is namedropped throughout. At turns wry and grim, Lowry is capable of laughter even in the middle of his most nightmarish scene without unsettling it.

Lowry achieves a unique balance in tone: authentically ominous (not lugubrious) and authentically playful (not arch). A continually striking contrast between the deepest despair of a life, the human being as little more than rotten meat destined for the abyss, and an intense zeal for life, as evidenced in his voracious appetite for every aspect of it. Mood swings. Frightening dark, rousing light.

And finally, strangely and wonderfully, absorbing everything on offer in Under the Volcano is challenging but not forbidding. Clearly Lowry doesn’t shy away from difficulty. But his theme is transparent, acting as a firm thread for the reader to grip no matter where the book goes.

The best answer to the question of how Lowry pulled off his grand novel is a metaphor he took to heart: He built a pier in the pond outside his home in Dollarton, British Columbia, where the novel was largely written. It was flimsy, unprepossessing. But, when a storm came and went, it was still standing. 

It was still standing.

The story of his rapid upward trajectory would be funny, or funnier, if it ended there. Success, however, proved to be yet another hell. So I can’t say whether Malcolm Lowry would have appreciated my appreciation.

3 and DA: Banner #18 for the Celtics

     They were the team to beat from the start. They ended it far ahead of every other team in the standings. The only thing left for these Celtics was to win it all and now they’ve done so, in five games. No qualifications necessary to sum up this season: the Celtics did indeed dominate. Truly: it was their year. Something else to add is that no individual player on the team dominated. The wisdom of relying heavily on a superstar, or giving up depth to add one or two others, took a hit. In the wake of Boston’s victory, I find myself even more interested in the shrewd moves and risks, the yearslong development and luck, necessary to construct a sturdy, balanced championship team and not an expensive, splashy, high-expectation, fragile “super team.”

Though he could barely make a 3 for a long time during this series and fouled out of game 3, Luka Dončić is sure to get his points. After him, it’s Kyrie Irving, who isn’t guaranteed to provide 20- or 30-plus points a night (he had trouble in Boston). After him, I couldn’t say which Maverick would reliably contribute on the offensive end. But what fascinated me about the Celtics is that they never had one threat to target. Jaylen Brown, Finals MVP, might have a relatively quiet night, Jayson Tatum’s own 3-point shooting percentage might plummet, and it never seemed to be fatal. Kristaps Porzingis, in his first game back from injury before suffering another injury in game 2, played like a potential Finals MVP. Derek White (who had his face smashed into the floor, leaving him bloodied with a chipped tooth, in game 5), Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, Sam Hauser, Payton Pritchard (with the dream shot from half court in game 5): always poised, aggressive, and ready to make up the difference. And Brown and Tatum don’t just score but can do most everything.

With 18 championships, the Celtics have become the winningest team in the league. 18! So, this offseason, the most important conversation to be had is about how the Warriors are going to catch up, dammit!