Human Nature, reduced

I had a few minutes to read yesterday sitting in front of the Central Library, waiting for my students to appear. And this moment, in a profile of movie marketing exec Tim Palen, made me laugh:

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it).

Collective wisdom is awesome. And sad. Ooh, and it stays good even as we get older:

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. ... Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them.

So if you've ever wondered how exactly the film industry saw you, now you know.

What's in a Love Story?

It's a little creepy when you are discussing something (or someone) and then it pops up unexpectedly in a different location. Just last weekend I got a MySpace message from a childhood friend I hadn't been in touch with in 10 years, but had just been talking about.

And this weekend, after watching Jeux d'enfants (or "Love Me if You Dare") I had been thinking about what makes a love story. And what relationship the love story has with real-life love. (Thank you to my friends who made v thoughtful comments on this topic.) At any rate, I wondered how necessary conflict was to both the story, and the actual love. Was it strengthened by adversity?

Of course, I am not alone pondering this. (Obviously.) I open the LA Times Book Review this afternoon and discover Louisa Thomas' review of the Jeffrey Eugenides anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. And between them, Thomas and Eugenides restate my thoughts, and then respond to them. Check it out:

What makes a love story? The answer found in "My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead," an anthology of short stories edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, may surprise. The thread that binds these 27 disparate tales -- spanning 120 years -- is loneliness. Love here doesn't join people together. More often than not it cracks them apart.

The objects of love can take many forms: the beloveds who don't love their lovers in return. Or the beloveds who were once in love but then fell out. Or the beloveds who have died. Betrayal knows many guises. In each case, the root of these stories is unhappiness; rain is its sustenance (weather is a recurring motif). The blossom -- love -- can be beautiful, but it quickly withers and rots.

"A love story can never be about full possession," Eugenides writes in the book's introduction. "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name." (Tell that to Jane Austen, but he has a point.)

That quote by Eugenides said - far more coherently than I had been able to - exactly what I had been trying to all weekend long. So thanks.

Sliding Doors

This 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film is one of my favorites. It's a reminder of how little it takes sometimes to send life hurtling down another path entirely. And reinforces my childhood belief in parallel universes. (Do I believe in them still? I couldn't tell you.)

Anyway, the conceit of Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World is roughly the same. Although this time the choice the protagonist makes is hers alone, not forced upon her by a girl with a Barbie doll. And the setting - late 90s London - is also the same. Oddly enough. Maybe London is an epicenter of parallel lives? Irina has dinner with her partner Lawrence's friend, continuing a long-standing tradition while Lawrence is out of town. She's not particularly excited about her charge, but as the evening wears on, she is drawn inexorably toward Ramsey and is about, unless she can stop herself, to kiss him.

Then, in alternately chapters, the way life unfolds depending on her decisions. So many parallels. So similar, and yet utterly different. I'm not quite half-way through yet, but I am so drawn to the story. So fascinated. And surprisingly invested in the characters.

An early passage, from before the big choice:

At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker's tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly inlove, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. [...] Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden.

This rang so true to me. And yet, it's so strange that while we often feel this way about the people we know, we are able to invest so much of ourselves into these same situations when they occur for characters in a book, a film, or even a tv show. Any thoughts on why?

The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.