The Tender Bar (2021)

 Tye Sheridan is having a fine year in a very successful career. He is also in Paul Schrader’s very fine drama about the trauma of war;The Card Counter.

In this one he is the main character in a young man’s coming of age story set roughly in the last 30 years of the 20th Century. The 70s and 80s in the movie feel remote, long ago. Was it really that long ago? Part of that could be the Long Island setting. Perhaps there, in comparison to NYC, the suburban lifestyle is very concerned with a type of traditional notions about what a man is and what a woman is and what they can expect from one another. Part of this view of life is that all a young man needs to get through it all is to have another older male mentor to tell him what is what. In this JR is fortunate that he has a middle-aged uncle interested in his well being after JR and his abandoned mother, dad being mostly his DJ voice on the radio, moves into the crowded Manhasset home of the patriarch grandfather and extended family. 
Fortunately the uncle is more than a suburban bar owner and bartender. His mentoring is spot on for the lucky boy. The guy is a bookish autodidact with a closet (!) full of books, “Wanna be a writer? Read all these!”  
He eventually meets daddy with very disappointing results.
Will grow and blossom in spite of his alcohol saturated roots.
George Clooney directed this adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s memoir.
See it on Amazon Prime.

The Winter of Our Discontent

By John Steinbeck

This final novel by the Nobel Prize winner. It was written before he got that renowned dynamite and armement award.
This is a very strange novel. It is set in smalltown Long Island, a place where whaling was once a big industry supplying oil for lamps and such. The time is contemporary to when the novel was written, 1960.
Ethan Allen Hawley is the main character. Most of the novel is written in his first person voice. The Hawley’s were once a big family in town owning a whaling ship and a lot of prime real estate. Now Ethan only has the Hawley family house and works as a clerk, an employee, in the grocery store he once owned. He works for a “wop” and Italian immigrant. He is polite but two-faced bitter. He is a family man with a wife and two teen children, a boy and a girl.
His scheme is to win, get over by appearing totally honest, to sneak up and strike when no one is looking.

The novel has a tone of a good old America Our Town and while it keeps up that tone throughout, mostly by the voice of this jacular amiable Ethan, there is a rottenness that is permeating the whole place and this Ethen character. The rotten corruption becomes more obvious as the story moves on. Ethan’s schemes include heartlessly ratting out someone and perhaps giving enough rope to his alcoholic childhood best friend.

The reader is left with a bitter taste with no characters to really pull for other than perhaps the only sketched out women. Mary, Ethan's wife, seems nice enough and perhaps wouldn’t resort to the underhanded manipulations of her husband to get ahead. She doesn’t WANT to know the business, refuses to be told, and therefore maintains a facade of ignorant innocence.
Margie the town tramp with a heart of desperation is more interesting and somewhat likable, but she is plotting too, searching for some kind of security. Yet the novel doesn’t appear to want us to stretch our empathy to the extent of actually “liking” any of these poor people trapped in corrupt decaying USA. It is as if they made it that way themselves and maybe they have since they go along with continuing to perpetrate it.

Maybe the point of the novel is to illustrate that the USA is a soft nightmare of anti-social individualist insecurity. A fitting place to get an esteemed award from a dead armaments mogul.   

Last Summer: A novel by Evan Hunter

  

I cat sit in the apartments of friends in the summer and this one in East Harlem, maybe not far from the author’s childhood home, has a few Evan Hunter/EdMcBain novels on the bookshelf. One of which is an old Signet paperback of Last Summer. I needed something to read and since I had positive feelings about the old movie and the novel is only 206 pages, I thought, “Why not?” Sometimes it is good to follow an impulse. 

I had remembered the movie as being good and the first time in saw both Barbara Hershey, and Richard Thomas. Also that it was not a happy movie, it involved bullying and worse. The movie script was written by Eleanor Perry and directed by Frank Perry. As a pair, they made some fine movies in the 1960s-70s. They made David and Lisa, another intimate human drama. After reading the brief Last Summer novel, I’d like to see the old movie again although it seems out of distribution currently. 

Last Summer is about four high school aged white children of economic and social privilege from Manhattan private schools dealing with life at their parent’s summer places on an island somewhere outside the city presumably a brief ferry ride off Long Island somewhere. 

The boys know one another from summers past. They bond in sort of a moderate triad with a brash attractive bikini clad girl, Sandy. She has found an injured seagull. These three hang out, acquire beer, do stuff with the seagull, none of which is heartwarming, and take Peter’s dad’s sailboat out. All the while we are becoming familiar with their characters and their relationship with one another. Dan (was that even his name?) is the sketchiest character even through his suggestions propel some of the plot. He is mainly focused on Sandy. Not so much in love with her but seeing her as a vehicle for his urges to act out sexuality. He is not motivated by need for intimate human connection, but sensational pleasure that is selfish and greedy and heightened by getting away with something natural and beautiful turned nasty naughty. He is a consumer. There must be a core of attempted connection in showing other boys/men how one has scored. 

They meet Rhonda. She is the opposite of Sandy. She’s injured by something horrible that happened in her family and socially awkward. 

Sandy is the dominant force in the triad. Through a series of encounters Rhonda is granted a type of provisional acceptance by Sandy into the group. The boys just follow. Ultimately it would have been better had Rhonda stayed away from them. 

The novel is written from the point of view and in the voice of Peter. This character is the nicer of the two boys, the nicer of all three really. Perhaps it is that he is the only one who gets to tell his side of the story. His description of the characters and their actions are all we have. We have to take him on his word, unreliable narrator that he no doubt is. There is the sort of weakness in him, an insecurity that compels him to stay with the group and its power. His is a self-protective chameleon nature. He blends in to hide, thrive, and consume. He develops sympathy and ultimately affection toward Rhonda.  But can he follow through? 

Peter is the story. He is the one who represents maybe all of us when we are on the fence, know what is right action, but must drift along with power. When we are given the choice of the uncertainty of loving, and take the alternative route with the others into fleeting sensation and a type of gang mentality. 

Evan Hunter presents a wonderfully constructed scene with the entrance of the Anibal character. Having read the brief online biography of Salvatore A. Lombino and his East Harlem roots it appears Anibal from Puerto Rico, with learner’s level but carefully accurate English, and living in East Harlem, is a sort of stand-in for the author or based on men he once might have known as a youth. Even Anibal is not immune to the allure of the young white rich pleasure seekers. Heartlessly they call him “Annabelle”, ignoring his repeated prompting that the accent is on the middle syllable, after all he is not a real white man. He’s just another disposable toy to bored consumer kids. The sequence is also of retro interest because it has a modern element of ancient computer dating. In the way familiar, not remote, from 21st Century hookup apps, as well as reflecting current “Build a wall” mentality incubating in kids. 

  50 years after this book came out, it is easy to see that the people in it are in their late 60s now and perhaps still holding on to that kind of gang power thing that seemed to work for them back then. They are the elite in business and politics still running things. Getting ready to pass it on to their survivors. Sophisticated yet ruthless they went through whatever it took to please their spouses,  children, and their good old American narcissistic personal needs. 

The rest of us? Maybe we are all Rhonda hanging on the fringes trying to fulfill our own narcissistic needs, by attracting high profile miserable jerks in control. We would probably be better off wandering away from them and playing alone or among ourselves.

Evan Hunter presents a sunburned noir. 

It still holds up.