How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Overview

Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061456442
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/11/2009
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Daniel Mendelsohn a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, is the author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. He teaches at Bard College.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

April 16, 1960

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Classics, University of Virginia, 1982; M.A., Classics, Princeton University, 1989; Ph.D., 1994

Website:

http://www.danielmendelsohn.com

Table of Contents

Introduction: How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken     xiii
Heroines
Novel of the Year (The Lovely Bones)     3
Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf (The Hours)     14
Victims on Broadway I (The Glass Menagerie)     29
Victims on Broadway II (A Streetcar Named Desire)     41
The Women of Pedro Almodovar (Volver)     53
Lost in Versailles (Marie Antoinette)     66
Looking for Lucia (Lucia at the Met)     79
Not an Ideal Husband (Ted Hughes's Alcestis)     93
Heroics
A Little Iliad (Troy)     111
Alexander, the Movie! (Alexander)     124
Duty (300)     138
It's Only a Movie (Kill Bill: Volume 1)     150
Nailed! (Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs)     161
The Way Out (Everyman)     176
Mighty Hermaphrodite (Middlesex)     188
Closets
The Passion of Henry James (The Master)     203
The Two Oscar Wildes (The Importance of Being Earnest)     213
The Tale of Two Housmans (The Invention of Love)     228
The Truman Show (the Stories and Letters of Truman Capote)     248
Winged Messages (Angels in America)     263
An Affair to Remember (Brokeback Mountain)     281
The Man Behind theCurtain (John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe)     289
Theater
The Greek Way (Greek tragedies in New York)     325
Bitter-Sweet (Private Lives)     347
Double Take (The Producers)     358
Harold Pinter's Celebration (Pinter Retrospective at Lincoln Center)     369
War
Theaters of War (Thucydides' History)     387
The Bad Boy of Athens (Medea on Broadway)     409
For the Birds (Nathan Lane's Frogs)     426
September 11 at the Movies (World Trade Center and United 93)     442
Acknowledgments     455

Editorial Reviews

An elegant collection of essays. . . . Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture. . . . These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brilliant. . . . Masterful. . . . Wise, funny. . . . A wonderful collection.” — Time Out New York

“Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis.” — The New York Sun

From the Publisher

Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis.

The New York Sun

Brilliant. . . . Masterful. . . . Wise, funny. . . . A wonderful collection.

Time Out New York

In this elegant collection of essays mostly from the New York Review of Books, NBCC award-winning author Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture, from movies like Kill Bill to Broadway musicals like The Producers, and the novels Middlesex and Everyman. They are springboards for Mendelsohn's agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In "Victims on Broadway I" he eloquently peels back layer after layer of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and criticizes not only the 2005 Broadway production as "stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility" but also the audience for what he sees as their inability to perceive pathos. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient, lost Greek epics the Cypria and the Little Iliad: unlike Homer's Iliad, they have not "a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion" lacking in epic grandeur. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company. (Aug. 12)

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Publishers Weekly

One could easily argue that these essays by Mendelsohn (The Lost) are a critic's criticism. Trained as a classicist, with graduate work in Latin and Greek, he states that he is more interested in writing about popular-culture interpretations of classical texts than about the actual classics. His breadth is quite impressive; he tackles female characters in the work of Pedro Almodóvar, the HBO series Angels in America, and the films The Hours, Kill Bill: Volume I, Brokeback Mountain, World Trade Center, United 93, and more. Within a theater section, he examines The Producers, Private Lives, and recent stagings of classic Greek dramas in New York. Mendelsohn's writing is bold; he is not afraid to be in the minority, for example, when he offers a searing treatment of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones in the sarcastically titled "Novel of the Year." Entertaining, thought-provoking, and often controversial, this book is not for the masses but for those who find pleasure in diving into literary criticism. Recommended for large academic and public libraries.
—Stacy Russo

Library Journal

Erudite, occasionally curmudgeonly collection of reviews and ruminations by award-winning memoirist Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, 2006, etc.). Most of these recent pieces first appeared in the New York Review of Books, whose generous space allotments give the author sufficient latitude to explore texts and performances in expansive, illuminating ways. Reviewing a staging of Euripides's The Children of Herakles, Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.) is able to elucidate the play's historical context and the author's biography as well as to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the design, direction and acting. He can thus display-and his readers benefit from-his potent critical tools: his vast knowledge, particularly of classical antiquity; his comprehensive reading; his remarkable capacity to see the tangled connections invisible to the less learned. Each review gives a mini-seminar on history, literature, biography and the arts. His interests range widely. He intelligently covers films about 9/11, Alexander the Great, the Trojan War and Virginia Woolf, cattily calling Nicole Kidman in The Hours "pretty without being beautiful." He critiques productions of plays by Harold Pinter, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde (who pops up continually) and Tennessee Williams (who gave Mendelsohn his title). He assesses Thucydides' Histories of the Peloponnesian War and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Few critics can be more illuminating-and few more dismissive. Read consecutively, Mendelsohn's essays begin to grate. He frequently implies that he alone gets what others manifestly failed to get. Sliced by his critical knife are some of his best-known colleagues, from Frank Richand David Denby to unnamed others who gush and coo, avers the author, over trash, sentimentality and mistakes. Like fine banquet fare: Some items to be wolfed down, some savored slowly, some best stored in the fridge for a later day. Agent: Lydia Wills/Paradigm

Kirkus Reviews