The American (1877)

It was a treat for me finally getting to this Henry James staple, which I somehow missed in spite of all the American literature courses I took in college. It's made to order for them, and indeed often taught, with its virtually diagrammatic exposition that pits raw New World vigor against effete Old World sophistication. The American of the title is one Christopher Newman—yes, I said Christopher Newman, a thundering point made more complicated for me in the present day by my association of "Newman" with Seinfeld and Wayne Knight—Christopher Newman, who has made his fortune at the age of 36 and arrived in Europe to seek a wife. Never mind that it's not exactly the life course of the average American, even then, even for a white man of Anglo-Saxon extraction. Ultimately, I don't know how much The American has to say about either Europe or America, though the contrasts as adduced remain mostly interesting. I actually engaged more with the story of the suitor and his beloved, and found that it paid off with satisfying emotional charges. Newman is a bit of a stuck-up prig, yet more open-minded in many other ways than the Europeans he meets and consorts with. It works well as a novel of manners, with many interesting and complex sideline characters and scenes. The villains, for villains there are, are very villainous, and I was caught up and deeply in thrall. Now and then it becomes too ludicrously dated, reminiscent of the horrors George Bailey suffers in the movie It's a Wonderful Life when he discovers that his wife's alternative future is to be an unmarried librarian. Occasionally, also, one wishes for the expedient of people simply declaring openly what they want and mean. At the same time, Henry James can be very good at closing off these avenues in the situations he develops. The characters are often vivid, their situations often truly impossible. In the end it turned out to be a real page-turner as at some point I realized I could not guess what would happen next, and cared very much about these people and wanted to know. It's no simple and tidy finish. Excellent.

"interlocutor" count = 5/431 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library.

Land of Dreams (1988)

Randy Newman's second and last album of the '80s (and eighth overall) is loosely unified by an overarching preoccupation with fragments and images of Newman's experience growing up in New Orleans after World War II. The themes are there plain enough, though they begin to submerge more toward the second half. "Dixie Flyer," "New Orleans Wins the War," and "Four Eyes," the first three, work it pretty good. "Something Special" made it into a movie with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell (also parts of "Dixie Flyer" became bumpers on TV and radio); the full transition to soundtrack man well underway (and remember, he came by it honestly, with Uncles Alfred, Emil, and Lionel Newman). "Roll With the Punches," a little further along, stands in as the designated voice of the ugly-racist POV for this album, and it's unpleasant as always, complicating it with an equally ugly bent toward parental-abuse types of justification. Remember, Newman never means any of it, busy as usual with the songwriting equivalent of having and eating his cake. Oh hell, he's allowed, even if it seems more and more arch mannerism; the songs and the attitudes and the distance between the singer and the songwriter at least remain interesting, more than can be said for most songwriters on the planet. Anyway, I don't know what it has to do with New Orleans or growing up, except obviously enough he's had those sentiments ringing in his ears all his life. "Masterman and Baby J" is another example of Newman's creeping hip-hop envy, a progression from "Mikey's" on Trouble in Paradise, perfectly entertaining for what it is (which is not hip-hop or New Wave). The biggest hit the album produced, "It's Money That Matters," also doesn't have much to do with New Orleans, nor does one of the best songs he ever wrote, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do," which dwells innocuously as the album-closer at the end of side 2 of the vinyl (and which I've written about before here). But they sure are great, lifting the level way high at the end with a couple of King-Kong wallops. In the end, I like Land of Dreams a lot and count it as one of my favorite Randy Newman albums but I know I'm in a minority here. Or maybe, at my age, I've just always been seduced by the broader and wider swaths of Adult Contemporary so clearly beginning to piggyback more and more on the soundtrack work. He still turns a mean phrase, however, no point denying him that.

Trouble in Paradise (1983)

For his first LP of the '80s (seventh overall), Randy Newman appeared to be traveling with enough cachet to attract quite the impressive stable of hands to help out: Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley, Rickie Lee Jones, Christine McVie, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Jennifer Warnes, and you get the idea. I bet they had a hell of a party. The production is buffed to the point that you can almost see your reflection in the gloss; even Wikipedia notes the loss of some of Newman's folk and country bent, replaced with keyboards and drum machines. If "Mikey's" is any indication, Newman hates himself for that. But the point of view of the singers in his songs never amounts to shit, does it? Trouble in Paradise is filled with songs that are equal parts novelty, broad plays for big laffs, and marvels of the school of tasty production, with a couple dreary ballads dotted through—all steeped in his usual dry, sly, and wry wit that verges on the caustically bitter, a stance we have come to know well. The style roams considerably from track to track and across the totality of the album. There aren't any outright homeruns, but a lot of base hits. I declare "My Life Is Good" as the funniest song (narrowly beating out the backing vocals on "I'm Different"), a riff on the privileged yuppie in his native environs, complete with name-dropping fantasy of Bruce Springsteen asking for some help of his own ("Ran, I'm tired, how would you like to be the Boss for awhile?"). It's also the easiest target, more or less. Well, wait a minute, Capetown, in "Christmas in Capetown," may be easier, beating Newman's familiar territory of the racist attitudes that will not go away. It's also possessed of the loveliest moment here, when the song abruptly swoons into the chorus. "Mikey's" may be the single most obvious cry for help of the curmudgeon trapped in the future, a zigzagging and robotic parody of New Wave four years late: "Whatever happened to the fucking 'Duke of Earl'?," he, or the singer, implores. And there are not one but two modest anthems about two emblematic American cities—Los Angeles and Miami. For me, start to finish, all things considered, and applying judicial prudence, it's a really solid set.

1. Chills, "Song for Randy Newman, Etc." (1992)

(listen)

I like how Chills songwriter and mainstay Martin Phillipps tries so hard to make this as particular to a concrete place as he can, to bucolic New Zealand. "In New Zealand our volcanoes and towns / Rest together in peace, keep their roots in the ground," he nonchalantly leads with on one verse. New Zealand, yeah, right. This song contains one of the most plain universal themes I've ever heard, laid out and rendered flat and bland and stripped down to the essentials of a singer and keyboards, masking itself in them, charting the dark night of the creative soul behind private choices and pains. All of us are implicated one way or another. Even the desperate name-checking—Randy Newman in the title only the most obvious, perhaps because those are his piano licks providing accompaniment. But there's another handful or so of usual suspects lurking and darting about the passageways of this deceptive little three-minute ballad ("Wilson, Barrett, Walker, Drake," Phillipps reels them off at one point). It's so full of humility and yet so arrogant and so certain of what it knows and resigned to it that it transcends and leaves behind the downer vibe it carries like a cross. I seem to keep saying things like that a lot, making excuses perhaps for a bunch of downbeat songs picked by a gloomy man. Looking over the last 15 or 20 on this list, oh hell the whole thing, I can see it fits a pattern. There's self-pity here (as there is in "Nightime" and "Somebody to Lay Down Beside Me" and down the line). Certainly self-obsession. But all of them, from Martin Phillipps to Alex Chilton to Jonathan Richman and all the others, also make a case, simply by doing what they do, for dignity and for cheer too, for staying engaged with the best of all things, however one may find them, and whatever pains they bring with them. Because the one thing we know is that there will be pain. Martin Phillipps makes that point here, but he also describes as poignantly as anywhere I know the rewards, with his elegant description of a songwriter's powers: "Can you hear sounds forming in your head / Do they say more than you've ever said." The answer is yes, I have heard them, hundreds of times, here and a thousand places. I can hear them still and they still say that much.

4. Randy Newman, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do" (1988)

(listen)

Some of those early Randy Newman albums seem to me a bit overrated, but it all balances out because I think the ones from the '80s are underrated—Trouble in Paradise and Land of Dreams, the latter of which provides a home for this. A lot of Randy Newman's best stuff tends to get over by slapping a wiseass smirk in front of calculatedly ignorant, outrageous statements, usually about racism and its analogues, set carefully into musically lulling settings (he takes his place in a family of movie composers), and then letting his partisans fob the excesses off on capital-I irony. It's a lot of passive-aggressive energy, to get to the point, but mostly I think it does work, not least because Newman himself remains so sly and so shrewd about what he does. He's got a lot of courage and a lot of wit. That's a good combination and this is where he puts it over with few peers, I think. At first it seems like the usual, in the singer's self-reported reprehensible behavior, the way he treats his family and loved ones and all his responsibilities, most painfully his children. But it's bracing when you realize how truthful he is, from beginning to end, and how he has found perhaps the perfect mouthpiece to do so, himself—or anyway, the singer is a performer too, it turns out. There's nothing funny about it. It's tragic. It's mean. It's chilling. The only thing giving irony any purchase at all is the idea that anyone like the singer describes himself would have this level of self-awareness, let alone the ability to articulate it so clearly and so matter-of-factly, a question as well with the great material on William Shatner's Has Been. This one's not got its due yet.