sarah eve kelly

‘Michael Moriarty is an amazing actor. You have to watch this show.’

That was my dad, back in 1990. I was in the sixth grade. We didn’t have much beyond Peasant Vision on TV in those days, but inasmuch as we gathered round that window to the outside world, it was to watch two shows: CBC’s The Fifth Estate (which I largely ignored) and Law & Order (which I was infatuated with).

My dad doesn’t often make pronouncements about things. I’ve gotten three (beyond this one) that I can remember vividly: that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony must be listened to whilst lying down; that I should feel free to judge people based on whether or not they liked The Lion in Winter starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, and that I was going to play the clarinet, whether I liked it or not. So when he piped up about Michael Moriarty, I listened.

Last week I found out that Law & Order had gotten the axe from NBC after a twenty-year run, and last night I watched the series finale. What an innocuous finale it was. I didn’t feel like the 27th Precinct or the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was shutting down so much as I felt that my window on it was closing. There was nothing to cry about in the episode, not really. But when my media player shut down and all I had left was my computer, I sort of felt like someone had taken my house away.

Twenty years. That beats a lot of things. It outruns my relationship with my husband by eight years. It outruns the longest stretch of time I’ve lived in a single dwelling by fifteen years. It might have been the last thing my parents had in common. That show is older than three of my cousins, one of my sisters, and two of my nephews. In a very backwards, twisty, oblique way, it represented a stability that I’ve been consistently unable to manufacture for myself. Every week, a new episode of Law & Order. And now: Law & Order: Los Angeles? LOLA? QTF, man?

The cast of this show was managed sort of like a hockey team: infamous Oilers ex-head coach Craig MacTavish said that any good team needed a ‘churn’ if it was going to remain supple and strong. It’s interesting that 1990 is when Law & Order began, and is also the last year that the Oilers won the Stanley Cup. The churn worked beautifully for the former, and more or less disastrously for the latter.

I felt betrayed when Claire Kincaid left (I was fifteen; I believed in love and justice). I felt betrayed when Ben Stone left, for that matter, though my love for Sam Waterston is unconditional. I cried when Adam’s wife died. Of course, casting mistakes were made (I shall not name names, but there were dark years). But this was a solid show with a solid formula that consistently attracted serious talent. And watching it disappear into the ether of cancelled shows is much sadder than, say, The Simpsons being cancelled (seriously: ninety per cent of their best episodes were in the first nine seasons; there I said it). There were only moments on this show when one thought: have they done all they can do? Because then they did something else, and did it better.

I thought the twentieth season had a stronger cast than the show had seen in years. (Lupo is the most compelling detective that show has seen since Mike Logan, and you heard it here first. Maybe.) It never occurred to me that this might be the last. As someone recently said, sure, Sam Waterston has his Ameritrade ads, his TD ads, but how are his eyebrows going to find work now?

I’m sure NBC had its reasons. But this show followed me from BC to Alberta and back and back again; it followed me to London and Cambridge and back again; when I tell you I was more or less flat-chested when the show started, maybe you’ll get an idea of how important this show has been in my life. So I’m here to apologise if I took it for granted. And for the love of Christ, television, please don’t cancel anything else without consulting me first. I’m not sure if my psyche can handle it.

Till next time, &c &c.

Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you?

The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad.

It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the knack of it eventually. It poses a bigger problem in fiction. For a reader to truly engage in (for example) a novel, there must be a character to whom we can hitch our wagons - someone we feel sympathy or empathy for, someone we admire, someone whose fate we invest in. This is only a general rule, not an absolute one - plenty of novels reflect ideas instead of characters, and others read like a slow-motion car crash: every character is detestable, but you can’t take your eyes away. Still, though: the swiftest route to home base is with a sympathetic main character, and the easiest way to make a character sympathetic is for that character to share the reader’s values.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. Yes, I know, I’m coming late to the party. I always do: it means I can go on binges and watch an entire season in three days. And Mad Men got me thinking about values. Its critical acclaim has been almost universal: a gritty, unsparing look at the corporate world of the 1960s. As far as I know there’s only one really loud guy speaking out against it, and that’s Mark Greif in the London Review of Books. Of Mad Men he has this to say:

I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged.

I have to say I like the show. It’s engaging in that chocolate box, ‘just-one-more-and-then-I’ll-go-to-bed’ kind of way. But because I agree completely with Greif, I’m trying to figure out why I like it.

Admittedly it’s tough not to be present-centred about the 1960s, a decade that suffers from a mountain of misinterpretation owing to the patina that the US poured all over the American Family after the Second World War. The people who thought they were conservative weren’t, in fact, conservative at all: the suburb was a very new thing, and a wife being stuck there was a very new place for her to be stuck. In this particular decade, though, it’s true that there was one generation trying to keep the world in 1952, and another generation - my parents’ generation - standing upside down in a corner on LSD, representing the kind of anarchic change that would destabilise and eventually alter the world.

So how do you make the 1952 guys the good guys? Why are we watching this show? On some level, of course, it’s because we’re mesmerised - in the second episode Paul Kinsey tells Peggy Olson that copywriters’ desks are furthest from the elevators ’so we can’t sneak out’, and I’m left wondering, with Scotch and cigarettes right at your desk, why you’d ever want to sneak out. It speaks (on one level, anyway) to a kind of permissive society that feels about as realistic to me as the underwater world in The Little Mermaid. I’ve certainly never been there.

(There is a post, by the way, to be written about how cigarettes have become a historical tag. Show where, what, and how often people were smoking, and I could probably tell you which decade you’re talking about.)

In a way, though, it’s like watching reality television: gazing into someone else’s office or living room and being able to feel smug. We’re more civilised than that; we’re more enlightened than that. It’s present-centred: the show invites us to view these lives from the point of view of our own lives in a way that The Tudors avoids by a country mile. There is something about the recent past that makes us long to believe that progress has been made, or what we call progress, because the very concept of progress is newer than you think. Greif is right when he says the smugness we feel is unearned. Being a woman in the workplace, for example, is still a tax - it’s just an invisible one now, like VAT. Tot up the numbers and you’ll see how little women are still being paid, and it’s remarkable how few women today are aware of that.

Anyway. Off the point.

Do you watch this show? Do you like the characters? Is there one you’ve hitched your wagon to? Or are they, as Greif asserts, a ‘toybox of tin stereotypes’? For my own part, I haven’t found one that I’m really able to like (always excepting Joan, of course, but she’s not in the show nearly enough) - the overwhelming feeling is one of pity. The wives are trapped, but so too are the husbands; the junior execs are trapped, but so too are the seniors. There is a constant undercurrent of being trapped, and that is present-centred. It’s not possible that everyone was that miserable in postwar middle America; if they were, they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to keep it exactly the way it was.

The setting of the more distant past seems, on some level, to sidestep this fascination with how They are not like Us. There are the little things - we’re tickled by the idea of women using white lead in their makeup in the same way we’re tickled by seeing secretaries smoking at their desks - but by and large, in the world of historical drama (as opposed to history), we’re able to take these characters and their worlds on their own terms. Or is that true? We cheer on the women in the past who jump out of their moulds (there is a reason that Anne Boleyn has been done and done again and can never be done enough: everybody loves her, or loves to hate her), and we scowl at the ones who say anything of duty or restraint. We want to hear all about the wife’s petty rebellions, and we don’t pause to consider that the sisterhood, such as it was, did not self-identify as oppressed until the eighteenth century or better - and certainly didn’t do it with any kind of consensus until the turn of the twentieth century. This wasn’t because they were betraying themselves, or because they didn’t believe in themselves. It was because they didn’t share our values. How could they? They didn’t live in our world. They had vocation, and more often than not (believe it or not) took pride in it. They were three-dimensional human beings, and we don’t realise that by only liking the mould-cracking ones - by feeling pity or contempt for the ones who lived according to the values and traditions of their own time and place - we do them a disservice, and offer them staggering disrespect.

Hilary Mantel speaks of hitching the camera of a story onto the shoulder of one character: it is through that character’s lens that you see the world while you’re reading (or watching). It is the author’s job to make you comfortable enough in that world that you stop thinking like yourself for a little while and start thinking like that person. More often than not we ascribe bigotry or ignorance to the behaviour of historical figures - the best we can say for them is that they didn’t know any better. Is it possible to step off our plinths and truly understand them, or are the best-loved historical novels always going to be about the people in the past who thought most like us?

I ask because I don’t know. I think it would be a tremendously difficult exercise to make any main character of mine pro-life or pro-eugenics or anti-Semitic or any of those things while still making readers love her. It would mean first loving her myself, and I think I could probably do that if I were more of an artist and less a creature of my own time and circumstance. This isn’t a rant; I don’t really have a point of view here. But I still wonder why I want to watch more of Mad Men - who am I invested in? Do I want them to learn something? Do I want to feel superior? Maybe I want to see what things might have been like for my grandmother - who knows. Until the show can make me root for someone (regardless of his or her values), I can’t help thinking it hasn’t done its job.

But now guess what I’m off to do. It’s been a harrowing day, readers, a harrowing day. I spent seven and a half hours fixing my computer (which is to say I yelled at it and pointed threatening cigarettes at it), and even now I’m not sure if it’s OK, and bloody hell, it’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist’s object was to clear the head; it was Garp’s opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess - to make the messy things work for you.

That passage is from my favourite chapter of my favourite book: Chapter Nine, ‘The Eternal Husband’, of The World According to Garp by John Irving. It is a book about a writer. Most books about writers don’t work; this one does. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do.

So many of my revelations come when I’m desperate for new TV. I avoided watching Grey’s Anatomy for, what is it now, almost five years. It sounded like Ally McBeal with doctors, and I was never interested. I have now watched two episodes and haven’t been dissuaded of my original assumption, but I’ll keep watching because it’s summer and there’s fuckall else on. I’m an optimist.

I watched the second episode on my Sunday break between school and writing - I needed something to help me switch gears in my head. It made me think about story. When you’re sitting on your hands wondering if your novel will ever sell - or after the general quality of your present and future works - a lot of things inspire you to think about story in a melancholy way. This second episode of Grey’s made me think of Garp, and what he might think of the ‘mess’ of the story arc and how it was ‘cleaned up’.

The premise of Grey’s Anatomy is a bunch of rather gorgeous young doctors working in a hospital whose only complications are allegorical. This episode I watched today begins with the main character, Meredith Grey, talking about the importance of boundaries - personal, professional, and social. It ends with her saying that boundaries ‘don’t keep other people out; they just fence you in’, after which observation she takes her turtlenecked, leather-handbagged gorgeous self off to the parking lot to hang with her other doctor friends.

I have no objection to this, but it strikes me that it is writing, and not psychiatry, that attempts to ‘clean up’. Psychiatry seems at least to recognize that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. In writing, there is simply no room for broken eggs.

This episode had one object in mind: show interns learning the ropes and growing up and getting to know each other. How distracting would it be if one of them were ugly, right, or overweight, because then you’d wonder how an ugly person came to be a doctor, and that would have to be a part of the story. Fat people can be secondary characters, not principals. This is of course true of most television, most film; and the best that novelists can do with such a thorny issue is avoid physical description of their characters at all.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could have an ugly main character without making an issue of it? I know I’m not the first person to say that. (’It’s like,’ Liz Lemon says, ‘those Dove commercials never even happened.’)

When I first queried The Fidelity Trial, I did it with the mess left in. I was lucky enough to find an agent who was willing to work with me to make my story a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted ugliness, illiteracy, and people peeing their pants. (How likely is it, really, that you could keep vigil in a closet for a night without having to go to the bathroom? Come on.) But that didn’t make a story. If the lady pees her pants (or whichever garment you prefer) during her all-night vigil, you forget what the vigil’s about.

People say that the best art reflects life; I don’t know if that’s true. I think we’ve enough life around us to reflect life, and that art should do something else, or at least come at it from a different angle - even holding up a mirror to something makes it look different, makes its nose more crooked or straight.

When asked about his portrayal of Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers says, ‘The reality is that viewers don’t want to see an obese, red-haired guy on a TV series.’ He makes it seem as though he’s made a discomfiting artistic decision, there, and defends it by going on to say that ‘nobody can tell me that how I played Henry isn’t right.’ So here we have Henry at a different angle - and who’s to say it’s the wrong one? I’m a Tudor historian, and I can’t say that. We all know that he was well on his way to fattitude by 1537, but his being fat, in a way, is like my maid of honour peeing herself - it’s become a distraction, and an excuse not to look at what else he was.

It’s another way of rearranging the mess, right: not using it, as per Garp’s instructions, but clearing a space on the floor so that you can move and look around. The Tudors eliminates Fat Henry from the mix, and that’s problematic, because with it they also eliminate Henry’s own character arc: you can’t show someone hardening, which is what Henry did, if he just goes from gorgeous bastard move to gorgeous bastard move. But it’s also interesting and clever: it makes you more willing to look at him, to understand him as a human being, to trust him again and again, because you want to trust Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, no matter how many asshole stunts he pulls.

But The Tudors is airbrushed fare: you’re not meant to see anything unpleasant beyond throats being slit, so it’s dangerous to read too much into it. The show was never meant to be about reality, which makes its occasional genuine insights all the more alarming.

I think what bugs me about Grey’s is that it has no such cartoonish claim: it wants to be gritty, to be real, to be frightening and cute and funny and poignant - in short, to run the gamut. And yes, it might be distracting if Ellen Pompeo had a huge boil on her nose or one tit bigger than the other. But what I do find distracting is the idea that, after a shift of however many dozens of hours, she doesn’t look dirty; her face is free of mascara flakes (not possible); her pants don’t have that accordion of wrinkles from sitting down that all pants have except when they’re fresh out of the wash.

So too with shows like 30 Rock, for all that I love my 30 Rock. Liz Lemon is meant to be a rough caricature of Tina Fey 15 years ago, the old Tina Fey who was a full 35 pounds heavier than she is now. So the show leaves the food in, and leaves us watching in torment while new skinny Tina Fey eats her way through another week in the life and never so much as feels bloated. There are a lot of explanations for this, and I’ve made them all - a bag of cheezies a day isn’t going to make you fat if that’s all you eat, for example. (This is not a diet. This is not a lesson.) But still, it stops you, every now and again - you love it at first, because she likes just what you like! And then a few episodes in, you look at her, and you look at you, and you think that Liz Lemon must have some secret she’s keeping from you. And maybe she does! Maybe season four will be all about Liz Lemon’s Tapeworm. Who knows.

I think my point is that the viewing and reading public can probably be trusted with seeing a bit more of the mess without becoming distracted. The problem with The Fidelity Trial, in its incarnation circa 2008, was that the story wasn’t complete - not that there were too many elements, but that there were vital elements missing. When you know what your story is - when you have your beginning, middle, and end - then you can start pouring on the mascara-flake detail that gives it dimension and makes it real.

And if you fail to do that, well, you’ll have a monstrously successful primetime television show that some unwashed bint in Cambridge will waste an hour complaining about.

(I can’t believe I wanted to post about the art of the mess and ended up with such a telling microcosm of the Achilles heel of all of my first drafts. Try clearing room on your virtual floor to sort this shit out.)

Till next time, &c &c.