Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

This book is a collection of humorous essays. It is hilarious. I love how seamlessly Allen is able to weave together high culture and the profound with the absur: Faulkner and Dostoyevsky and Flanders Mealworm, a fledgling writer selling his soul to Hollywood; the private dick who helps a rich socialite track down a priceless truffle; the scriptwriter who takes a job for an online company that sells prayers. (A prayer for a man wanting his wife to bear him a son: "May the broad lie down in green pastures and drop foals abundantly.")

The ideas for many of these essays came from actual events and items. One of my favorite essays begins with an excerpt from the New York Times Magazine about technologically enabled clothing (shirts that can charge cell phones, pants that can trap offensive scents and release appealing smells, etc.). As someone who is allergic to most of the stuff they treat dress shirts with to make them idiot proof, I found this essay especially funny.

Mere Anarchy was pure entertaining absurdity.

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

I decided to jump on the books by comedians wagon… I wish I had jumped onto it with a better book.

I adore Woody Allen. I like his ridiculous glasses, his sometimes too grandiose gesticulations, and his movies. I did not, however, like Mere Anarchy. It called seductively from the library bookshelf, misplaced beside a Post Secret collection. When brilliant men call you, you answer…On the rare occasion that this happens. I think that maybe Woody was calling to someone other than me, like the cute chick in the overstuffed arm chair near the section of books about Iraq and the war. They could have been more compatible.

When asked at my interview to write for The (Cr)Appalachian and was asked what I wanted to write on, I said I would be interested in doing book reviews on recent releases and dropped the name of Mere Anarchy, just knowing it would be fabulous before I even opened it.

I was so wrong. It’s a collection of short stories about everything obscure you could imagine, where someone who was clearly modeled after Allen himself is being subjected to numerous improbable situations that should be comical but aren’t. I’m not sure if the main character is always meant to be the same or not, but in most all of them, the character is called boychick, which for some reason seemed to get under my skin. The language employed was too hip, too forced, and too much after the first several stories. This might have been better as an audio book with everything read in his voice.

My honeymoon period with Allen is over. Or maybe I’m just jealous that the story about the New Age commune taught boychick, but not the reader, how to levitate.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

I normally don't read the back covers of books if I have not already read the work itself. While I didn't read the brief synopsis on the back of Ethan Frome, the one-sentence description at the top caught my eye. "The classic novel of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside." This is a very good description of Ethan Frome.

As Brent pointed out in his review of this book, the plot is not all that complicated, noting that it could be described as a character study. I also agree with Brent on the subject of Wharton's prose. At times I found it completely arresting. The images that her words conjured up were amazing.

As I was reading the book, I thought numerous times of the Woody Allen film, September. Ethan Frome and September share many of the same themes, such as forbidden love, depression, and complicated relationships. But the strongest connection between the two is the setting. Edith Wharton's vivid descriptions of the fictitious Starkfield, Massachusetts make the town an active character in the story. Often the town, and the weather associated with it, do as much to progress the plot as any of the characters do. In September, the setting is not a town, but a house--a house which Woody Allen has described as the most important character in the film.

Another film that Wharton's novella brought to mind was Lost in Translation. I would find it hard to believe that Sophia Coppola had not read Ethan Frome prior to making the film. Besides the general melancholy feel of the movie, some of the characters are quite similar to those in Wharton's work.

Note: If you have not read Ethan Frome, leave the introduction that accompanies this edition until the end. If you read it before, it will ruin what little twists and turns of plot the story does have.