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F E B R U A R Y 1 9 9 6

by Phoebe-Lou Adams
No Intermissions
by Carol Easton.
Little, Brown, 560 pages,
$29.95. Read the first chapter of
No Intermissions
Agnes de Mille (19061993) has been described as
"perhaps the best dancer ever to write and the best writer ever to dance."
As a choreographer, "she created new ways of seeing and thinking about
dance." And "she brought fresh air into ballet and irrevocably changed
dance on the Broadway stage" with her work in Oklahoma, which
converted dance from the peripheral ornament of a musical show to an
integral part of the action. As a writer of elegant, witty, sometimes
impassioned memoirs, she exercised the autobiographer's traditional right
to tell things her way. Practically speaking, she condensed the trivial,
minimized the embarrassing (unless it could be turned into comedy), and
omitted what she preferred not to remember. Ms. Easton's biography follows
De Mille regarding the trivial and, to some extent, the embarrassing, but
what the dancer chose not to remember has been thoroughly researched and
proves thoroughly interesting. Her mother, the daughter of Henry George of
the single-tax theory, was a more possessive and misguided parent than De
Mille ever admitted, and her uncle Cecil, the director of flamboyant
Hollywood epics, a source of unprovoked resentment. Ms. Easton's analysis
of the content of De Mille's ballets is intelligent, her use of quotation
adroit. Her biography can only add to De Mille's posthumous stature as a
major contributor to dance in America. De Mille could be hell to work
with, but she was a grandly amusing woman and a wonder of
accomplishment.
Don't Die Before
You're Dead
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Random House,
415 pages, $25.00.
Buy Don't Die Before You're
Dead
Mr. Yevtushenko's exciting novel about the 1991 attempt to
overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev's government puts the reader right on the
barricades along with the author. It throws together personal observation,
real and imaginary characters, actual and fictional events, satire and
tragedy, past and present, prose and poetry. The fictional characters
include an honest, and therefore disaffected, policeman, an
émigrée poet returned from Paris, and a former soccer star
fallen into drunken decay. The real characters, with the exception of
Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and the author, are given generic names such as
"the Crystal-Clear Communist" and "the Great Degustator." The fictional
characters permit the author to portray aspects of Soviet society such as
the expatriate literary colony in Paris and the future of superannuated
athletes. The soccer player provides some superb comedy--a ludicrous
teenage drinking party and a tournament in which a team of creaky but wily
veterans tries to lose at least one game to its generous but inept local
hosts. The dazzling variety of effects in Mr. Yevtushenko's semi-history
winds down with a wistful poem, "Goodbye Our Red Flag," and a postscript
denouncing the war in Chechnya: "Now Russia is nowhere--between the
past and the future. Nevertheless that is better than ending up behind the
barbed wire of the past. Maturity is measured by the number of lost
illusions."
The Octopus's Garden
by Cindy Lee Van Dover.
Addison-Wesley, 183 pages,
$20.00.
Read the first chapter of
The Octopus's Garden
Ms. Van Dover is an oceanographer and a former pilot of
Alvin, a deep-sea submersible used to explore the ocean floor, once
thought to be lifeless, now known to harbor a variety of organisms. At
9,000 to 12,000 feet below the surface strange creatures cluster around
hydrothermal vents and subsist on chemicals extracted from the erupting
water. The vents sometimes create chimneys that can collapse at a touch,
which makes maneuvering Alvin a delicate matter, and there is a
constant possibility of landslides and earthquakes. The author describes
this bizarre underwater world with a mixture of almost lyrical visual
pleasure and a run of technical terms to mind-boggle the uninitiated. She
also reports some unnerving details: deepwater shrimp are disgustingly
inedible, and Alvin, which is the size of two bathtubs, carries
three people on its nine-hour hitches.
The Tunnel:
The Underground Homeless of New York City
by Margaret Morton.
Yale, 160 pages, $45.00/$20.00.
Read the first chapter of The Tunnel:
The Underground Homeless of New York City
In the 1970s a two-and-a-half-mile railroad tunnel along New
York's Hudson River frontage was abandoned. By 1991 more than fifty
otherwise homeless people were living in that tunnel, where they had
contrived the rough equivalent of a hunting and gathering society,
self-supporting and unobtrusive. Amtrak, proposing to reactivate the
tunnel, wanted them ousted. Before that happened, Ms. Morton managed to
photograph the dwellings in the tunnel--which ranged from a bedroll on
a ledge to rooms with furniture, stoves, bric-a-brac, and pets--and to
interview some of the inhabitants. The interviews that accompany her
striking photographs reveal stories of hard luck, unhappy marriage, poor
judgment, and substance abuse, but they also reveal the impressive amount
of energy, ingenuity, and plain grit required of loners who are surviving
outside orthodox society. The tunnel people may not be sober nine-to-five
types, but they are neither lazy nor stupid. They deserve respect as well
as sympathy.
The Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie.
Pantheon, 448 pages,
$28.00.
Buy The Moor's Last Sigh
Mr. Rushdie's new novel is so intricate, so multi-faceted,
and so fast-moving that it keeps the reader dizzily enthralled from
beginning to end. It may also add a Hindu curse to the Islamic price on
the author's head, for beneath the surface glitter of the tale lies a
protest against the rise of chauvinistic Hindu fundamentalism and the
dissolution of a once tolerant and flexible culture. The Moor of the
title, who has nothing to do with Othello, is Moraes Zogoiby, the story's
narrator. He is the last male survivor of two European families that
flourished for centuries in the spice trade of the Malabar Coast. The
Portuguese Da Gamas claim illegitimate descent from the great
Vasco--improbably. The Jewish Zogoibys are suspected of descent, also
illegitimate and improbable, from Boabdil, the last Sultan of Moorish
Spain. The Da Gamas thrive on art, violence, and personal eccentricities
of which walking a stuffed dog on a leash is a mild example. The Zogoibys
remain largely offstage, but the activities of Moraes's father, Abraham,
indicate a talent for finance, political intrigue, revenge, and
dissimulation. The characters speak with a wild, crackling eloquence;
comic, horrible, and fantastic events merge and conflict; and the history
of modern India rumbles in the background. In addition to everything else,
the work is enormously entertaining.
Copyright © 1996 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; February 1996; Volume 277, No. 2;
pages 113-114.
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