Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians

Submit a question for the next column.

March092006

Joe Keenan: Frolics to Frasier and Back

Filed under: Looked Into


I've been meaning to mention that I got to interview the first-rate screenwriter-playwright-lyricist-novelist Joe Keenan recently, and here's my story (or just look at the previous post). On Monday I saw a staged reading of his show The Times, and every audience member I talked to felt the way I did: shattered, spooked, satisfied. We laughed a whole lot, too. It's time for this to be re-staged.

Here's how My Lucky Star, Keenan's swell new novel, begins:


It is never a happy moment in the life of a struggling artist when some fresh assault on his fragile dignity compels him finally and painfully to concede that Failure has lost its charm. He has up until this point soldiered bravely along, managing to persuade himself that there's something not merely noble but downright jolly about Struggle, about demeaning temp jobs, day-old baked goods, and pitchers of beer nursed like dying pets into the night. He would, of course, grant that la vie Bohème with its myriad deprivations and anxieties was not an unalloyed delight. But whenever its indignities rankled unduly he could console himself with his certainty that Bohemia was not, after all, his permanent address. Oh, no. His present charmingly scruffy existence was a mere preamble to his real life, a larval stage from which he would soon gloriously emerge into the sunshine of success. Its small embarrassments were, if anything, to be prized, not only for their lessons in humility but for the many droll, self-deprecatory anecdotes they would later provide, stories he'd polish and trot out for parties, interviews, and—why be pessimistic?—talk shows.

Then one day he is faced with some final affront, minor perhaps, but so symbolically freighted as to land on him with the force of an inadequately cabled Steinway. He reels, stunned, and dark speculations, long and successfully repressed, rampage through his mind. For the first time he allows himself to wonder if his life twenty years hence will be any different than his present existence. "Of course it will be different," coos the voice in his head. "You'll be old." Here's the whole excerpt.

0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
2009 New Yorker Desk Diaries
Pretty!