Judgment on the Orient Express

Last updated on: December 13, 2017 at 5:30 pm By Eve Tushnet

in which I take in my little review which couldn’t find a home. That’s why it’s written all professional-like: Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express opens with a slapstick religious conflict and rises to a windswept, prosecutorial climax. In between there are gunshots and stabbings, and the great detective Hercule Poirot, sans his traditional embonpoint, leaps around a train trestle in pursuit of a suspect. The setup of Express is simple. Mr. Ratchett, a shady American businessman (Johnny Depp,... Read more

Work Is a Four-Letter Word: I review “The Animators”

Last updated on: December 13, 2017 at 10:43 am By Eve Tushnet

at First Things: It may be gauche to say that novels should be moral tales; but nothing can compete with morality for dramatic tension and structure. Kayla Rae Whitaker’s debut novel, The Animators, is a raw and propulsive book . . . right up until its fizzly, self-satisfied ending. The Animators centers on the friendship of two hot-mess women. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses meet in art school. Mel walks around in a swirling Pigpen cloud of sleaze and chaos;... Read more

Gay Catholic Whatnot–on Russian Catholic Radio!

Last updated on: December 13, 2017 at 10:24 am By Eve Tushnet

This is so cool! You can listen to the interview in English (here, I think?) or read it in Russian, thanks to the hard work of interviewer & translator Nikolay Syrov: Ив Ташнет — писатель из Вашингтона, открытая лесбиянка и католичка, избравшая путь посвященной Богу жизни. Она родилась в 1978 году, а в 1998 году, во время учебы в Йельском университете, стала католичкой. Её первая книга «Геи и католики» отражает её путь от либерального атеизма к жизни в вере в Католической Церкви,... Read more

She, the Jury: Some notes on “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”

Last updated on: December 13, 2017 at 10:21 am By Eve Tushnet

A movie about which I have intensely mixed feelings! A lot of these thoughts were formed in conversation with Charles Lehman, for which I am grateful. # Early on, we see a guy reading Flannery O’Connor and so we can guess that this violent story will show us a world somehow mangled, misfired. And my favorite thing about the film is structural: It’s about a series of attempts to get justice which kind of ricochet off their intended targets and... Read more

“Free Choice Is a Lie”: I review Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel

Last updated on: December 12, 2017 at 2:50 pm By Eve Tushnet

for First Things: A Book of American Martyrs, Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about the shooting of an abortionist by a Christian “Soldier of God,” is perfectly unempathetic. Lately we’ve heard a lot about how important it is to feel empathy for those on the other side of various moral, political, and religious divides. Even if we abhor the beliefs of others, we are exhorted to see them as complex human beings like ourselves. Oates will have none of it. She... Read more

Counting Days

Last updated on: December 11, 2017 at 2:49 pm By Eve Tushnet

Some notes on Advent & addiction. I’ve said before that David Carr’s Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life–His Own is the best addiction memoir of the many I’ve read. So much of it rang so true to me when I read it, in late 2011, when I was locked in a terrifying and all-consuming struggle to quit drinking. The bit about how your own words ring false to yourself because you’ve heard all... Read more

Death by Stereo: Movie notes

Last updated on: December 11, 2017 at 1:07 pm By Eve Tushnet

Starting with the low point, I’m afraid. Spinning into Butter is an extremely ’90s tale of racial unrest on campus. It is just not good enough in any respect. Anybody who has followed this sort of thing will guess the shocking twist literally in the first five minutes; I assume Sarah Jessica Parker is actually a good actress but she comes across as if she’s reading words off a page here, wooden and implausible; and the film says nothing, I... Read more

My Favorite Genre of America Magazine Articles

Last updated on: November 28, 2017 at 1:35 pm By Eve Tushnet

is the profile of somebody I didn’t know about, or didn’t know was Catholic, and now find immensely intriguing. Here’s my friend Catherine Addington on Cornelia Augusta Peacock Connelly, who founded a teaching order and lost custody of her children in a hard-fought legal battle with her Protestant-then-Catholic-then-Protestant husband: When Cornelia Augusta Peacock met Pierce Connelly, she was an orphaned heiress whose wealthy Presbyterian relatives disapproved of her marrying a middle-class vicar—let alone an Episcopalian. Young, smitten and economically independent,... Read more

“What it’s like going to church when you’re homeless”: My piece for America

Last updated on: November 16, 2017 at 12:05 pm By Eve Tushnet

interview-based, v. small number of people but they said some things you’ll want to read: Several years ago I was attending Mass at a downtown church. That day, if memory serves, the last weekday Mass was not crowded, so it stood out when a middle-aged man went up to receive Communion, then hurried out through the front doors of the church. When I left Mass myself I found him at the foot of the church steps, asking the better-off churchgoers... Read more

Let Him Be Filthy Still: “Wise Blood” & “Home”

Last updated on: November 16, 2017 at 11:48 am By Eve Tushnet

By coincidence I read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood for the first time right before reading Marilynne Robinson’s Home for the second. It was impossible to miss the common elements in these two intensely different novels: two men who reject Christ, for whom American racism is one of the most compelling arguments against Christianity, who have ferociously self-destructive urges toward pain as penance, and who have a disastrous sexual relationship with a young teenage girl. (Sabbath Lily Hawks is fifteen; Annie... Read more