A Wisconsin housekeeper stiffed by the skinflint architect Frank Lloyd Wright, referring to immoral goings-on at Taliesin: “Sin and pay” OK, “sin and no pay” not OK.
It’s in a review by Tom Shippey of T.C. Boyle’s novel The Women in the 3/6/09 Times Literary Supplement. All in all, the review is quite a shoot-down as I read it, at best ambivalent.
Final words:
At the end of each section you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and the way Boyle tells the story, that feeling gets stronger every time. And that, I think, is why the telling is the way it is.
Clever without turning cerebral, passionate without forfeiting emotional range; when there are novels like this to read, why would anyone bother with Aga sagas [household melodramas centered on the kitchen and domestic crises] or Sex and the City [Sarah J. Parker and friends]?
That said, the ambivalence fades away. In Shippey’s view, Boyle has authored a potboiler — in several meanings of that serviceable figure.
Shippey, if not also Boyle, presents Wright as a bounder of the first water, with no socially or other redeemable features but his genius.
* Today ChiTrib and Sun-Times have (Archbishop) Tutu the Clown scolding newsies for pressing Daley on plane trips taken for free from highly suspect donors: “I will absolve you and make you holy,” says Tutu.
* Yesterday Gary Sinise was questioned aggressively by a Trib writer about Brian dePalma’s Iraq war movie, to which Sinise, a supporter of the military, objected on unfairness grounds.
Sinise, briefed on the film and knowing dePalma, hadn’t seen it? And this? and that? It’s always a surprise when a reporter pushes a celebrity that way.
Robert K. Elder, the reporter in question, may be an exception. He did have fun with NPR’s Ira Glass in an LA Times piece in 2000, peppering him with nervy questions.
* Yesterday in S-T Mary Mitchell said spanking is “obviously not a black thing,” though she supplied the black word for it, as if it is, “whupping.” (That’s a black word?) She means it’s not more prevalent among blacks than others?
But Rev. Geo. Clements told me in the 70s that it was, in an interview about corporate punishment at his Holy Angels school on the South Side, which he claimed was the world’s biggest Catholic elementary school and where whupping was always an option.
Blithe Spirit 