Apropos of Nothing review / Woody Allen's times and misdemeanours

Apropos of Nothing review – Woody Allen's times and misdemeanours

Dropped by the original publisher after a staff protest, the film-maker’s autobiography can be brutally honest but also a bore, and neither he nor Mia Farrow come out of it well

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 10 May 2020

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hough I see what he was getting at, I don’t quite agree with Hilaire Belloc, who once wrote that just as omelettes are either admirable or intolerable, and nothing in between, so it is with autobiography. Most memoirs, alas, struggle over the same things: fame, for instance, is often less interesting (or perhaps simply harder to describe) than the struggle to achieve it; the central irony of autobiography is that it’s far easier to be truthful about other people than it is to be honest about oneself. Such books tend, then, to be patchy: utterly delicious at times, but at other moments, stodgy and in need of seasoning.

If Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing was an omelette, you’d scoff down two-thirds of it pretty smartish, I think, after which – sated, to a degree – you’d mournfully scrape what remained on your plate into the bin. Later, you might be troubled by a hint of indigestion; even a little light queasiness. But in the morning, contemplating the Alka-Seltzer, I’m not sure you would be full of regret, let alone inclined to avoid omelettes for life. What I’m trying to say is that Allen’s autobiography is a mixed bag. If he can write (obviously, he can), and if he is, at points, surprisingly honest (eye-poppingly so, on occasion), then he can also be a bore and a self-deceiver. Of course, if you’re one of those who, disgusted by what you regard as his moral failings, has vowed never to watch Annie Hall or Manhattan again, then you’re unlikely to want to embark on Apropos of Nothing in the first place – and fair enough, that’s up to you. But I’m not in that camp. Nor can I comment on Allen’s alleged abuse of his adoptive daughter, Dylan, a crime of which he was first accused in 1992 (two police investigations into this have come to nothing). What I will say, however, is that I regard it as both disgraceful and alarming that Hachette, his original publisher, gutlessly dropped his book following a walkout by some of its staff – and that though I was sometimes repulsed by it myself, I was also fascinated, even entertained. So, shoot me. Again, that’s your choice.

Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Allen “doesn’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. But even so, he’s good on his Brooklyn childhood: smart and beady and occasionally funny. His parents – his father was a bookmaker; his mother worked in a florist – were, he tells us, as “mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit”, disagreeing on everything save for “Hitler and my report cards”. As a boy, he loved magic, fell hard for jazz, courtesy of the great Sidney Bechet, and found his most adored pal in the form of his cousin, Rita. Most readers will know already about the early career: the gags written for the tabloids, the work for radio and as a standup. What surprises in this account is the relative ease with which he became a writer and director (Take the Money and Run, in 1969, was the first proper film). He presents it here so casually: the equivalent of moving from, say, working in a bank to working in an estate agent’s office.

Woody Allen: ‘he can be acute when it comes to actors’.
Photograph: Arnaud Journois

He’s straightforward about his movies. He knows, mostly, which of them work and which don’t (or maybe it’s just that he agrees with me) – and he can be acute when it comes to actors, too. Plenty has been made already of his remarks about, among others, Scarlett Johansson (“when you meet her, you have to fight your way through the pheromones”), and I’m not about to defend him on this score. Yuck. The book is dedicated to Soon-Yi, the stepdaughter he seduced when she was 21 and who is now his third wife (she is 35 years his junior): “I had her eating out of my hand and then I noticed my arm was missing,” he writes, a line that could not be more tone deaf if it were Florence Foster Jenkins.

But reviewers have also quoted selectively, and while one doesn’t cancel out the other, it’s kind of great how much he admires the talent of, say, Judy Davis, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest – precisely the kind of women Hollywood likes to make invisible. His account of the mental illness suffered by his second wife, Louise Lasser, is unsparing to the point of cruelty. But the warmth he feels for her is obvious; they’ve remained friends. Ditto Diane Keaton, a woman who, as he puts it, dressed “as if her personal shopper was Buñuel” (sidebar: people tend to forget that Keaton was no longer his girlfriend by the time they made Annie Hall).

OK… I’m coming to it. Allen devotes around 100 pages – extremely energetic, committed pages: by turns angry and whiny, disingenuous and sometimes just plain baffled – to his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and its discovery in 1992 by her mother, his then partner, Mia Farrow, courtesy of some “erotic” Polaroids; to the subsequent allegation, made initially by Farrow, that he had abused their adopted daughter, Dylan; and to his later estrangement both from Dylan and his son, Ronan (the latter has always supported his sister; however, their brother, Moses, as Allen notes, has since taken the side of his father). None of this is edifying, to the point where I will avoid repeating the worst of it, British libel laws being somewhat stricter than in the US. However, Allen would have been equally damned had he said nothing at all on this score.

No, he doesn’t come out of it well. But nor does Farrow (his twisted partiality is one thing, but facts are another, and it has to be said that it took her an awfully long time – about 40 years – to turn on her friend, Roman Polanski, who in 1978 pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor). To return to where we began, here’s another thing about omelettes: you can’t make one without breaking eggs. This is a horrible, painful and, above all, highly opaque story, and it always will be – up to, and including, the day it is inevitably mentioned in the first paragraph of a long newspaper obituary.

• Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen is published by Arcade (£24.71).

THE GUARDIAN

Clive James in 1977 at the offices of the Observer, where he worked as television critic.

Clive James: the last interview

Two months before his death, the broadcaster, poet and critic spoke about his own mortality

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 1 December 2019

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ournalists shouldn’t interview people they know, or even (I think) acquaintances with whom they’re friendly. But in September I broke this rule, and went to Cambridge to talk to Clive James about his latest book.

The day before, I’d taken a call from his daughter, Claerwen James, the artist and my friend of more than 25 years. Clive was soon to publish a short book about Philip Larkin. He was pleased with it, and wanted to tell people about it. But he was also too ill, by this point, to see a stranger. Would I come? It would mean so much to him. I told her that I would.

I want to be clear. It is Claerwen who was, and is, my friend, not Clive. But still, he was a big and beloved figure in my life, and not only because she and I could spend hours at a time talking about our fathers in particular, and men in general. When I first met him, I was 25 and miserably toiling as a trainee in a Fleet Street newsroom. I knew no one, and nothing, and I was very shy, and thanks to these things – and the fact that he was a genius – I was a bit intimidated by him at first. Nevertheless, in those early years, he influenced me in all sorts of small but vital ways. I have a strong memory of an afternoon some time in about 1998. Claerwen and I walked into a room to find Clive listening to Joan Sutherland singing Bellini’s opera Norma. He was in a state that seemed to me to be close to sexual ecstasy: legs apart, head thrown back, a look of pure bliss on his face. I knew nothing of opera then, but as he translated her words for us – he sprang out of his chair to do this – I thought to myself: I’ll have what he’s having, thanks. That recording of Norma was the first opera I ever owned on CD, bought that very week. Clive’s enthusiasm, as bright and as powerful as a Klieg light, could make you want to read, listen to, watch or look at almost anything.

He was – this has already been said – very, very clever and very, very funny; he had a way of making you see that something could be both ridiculous and magnificent, and ever since I first learned this from him, I’ve always borne it in mind. He had, too, a sybaritic side that I adored. He could squeeze such pleasure from things. I’ve never seen anyone drink a bottle of Jacob’s Creek with so much enjoyment as him; it might as well have been Château Lafite in his glass. I thought of him, always, as deeply generous.

He noticed you, and what you were up to. Whenever, in later years, he was trying to get me to come to one of his book launches – I didn’t need much persuading – he would send me such sweetly beseeching emails. His “dazzlement division” needed me, he would insist. A certain kind of flirtation, like a certain kind of teasing, is a form of kindness, and for all that I did not take these messages too seriously (he was like this with everyone), that was how I received them: as kindnesses.

What I loved most of all, though, was to see him make Claerwen laugh. It’s my strongly held belief that a man who can make his own daughter – who is almost bound to be, however loving, a sceptic so far as her male parent goes – collapse into laughter is basically doing all right.

James with his daughter Claerwen, in a photograph taken by her mother, Prue Shaw. Photograph: Courtesy of Claerwen James

On that day in September, he made us both laugh a lot. When I arrived, he was sitting in the thin autumn sunshine on the little balcony off his sitting room (a balcony that once overlooked the famous maple tree that was the subject of one of his late poems). He had grown a beard, and that, and his happy wave when I came in, made me think of Robinson Crusoe. I was shocked by the way his cancer had ravaged his face – contrary to reports last week, it wasn’t his leukaemia that killed him, but a metastatic squamous cell carcinoma; in other words, it was the Australian sunshine he absorbed in his youth that did for him in the end – but his eyes were refulgent, and he was so full of grace, and so intact in every other way. Somehow, he was the very essence of himself. It was heart-stirring to see, an almost numinous thing, though I knew he didn’t believe in God.

Larkin had always been a bond between him, Claerwen and me: we just think he is the Man. The book Somewhere Becoming Rain is a gathering together of everything Clive ever wrote about Larkin. It was Claerwen’s idea; she designed the cover, and it’s dedicated to her. On that day, we talked about Larkin first.

When he grew tired, we gossiped a bit. He and Claerwen were looking for a new box set to devour, and I recommended Succession. (She told me later how much he liked it.) Finally, we looked at a draft of The Fire of Joy, which will be published next year and is a collection of “roughly 80 poems to get by heart and say aloud”.

As I turned its pages, I was struck, all over again, by the astonishing range of his reading. Here were Auden and Keats and Wyatt. But here, too, were poets I’d never heard of. Clive read (in multiple languages) like his life depended on it – and perhaps it did, in a way. Words, to him, were as necessary as water. What follows is part of our conversation. At the time, I knew it would be our last, and yet it was so easy. Clive loved to have an audience – and I loved to listen.

Philip Larkin, 1979.
Photograph: Jane Bown

Can you remember when you read Larkin for the first time?

The answer is yes, yes, yes – and yes. It was the cold winter of 1964. My landlord, a young publisher, said that if I really wanted to catch up with modern English poetry, I should read Philip Larkin. So I read The Less Deceived. Although I like to think that I brought a certain receptivity to the party – I was his ideal reader – I was knocked out straight away.

How did he make you feel?

First of all, the spoken rhythms were so wonderful. I still think he’s the tops in that way. Second, I knew exactly what the poems meant – and that’s what staggers me, still, about him. There can’t be many poets in any language who communicate with their readers on such a basic level. I went quietly mad for him.

I’d just arrived from Australia, and I wanted to tell him these things, so I wrote to him. I don’t know what drove me to be so crazy as to think he would have time to read a letter from me, let alone to answer it, which he did. Jesus Christ. It [my fandom] was akin to love. But [if you’re the poet] you don’t want too many lovers turning up.

By the time his last collection, High Windows, was published in 1974, you were in a position to review it. Was that a big deal for you?

Yes. The feeling was: this is history, and it’s happening to me. It’s an unbeatable thing, writing about art. It’s heaven.

Did it sadden you, what happened to Larkin’s reputation in the period after his letters came out in 1992, and his biography the following year? [Larkin stood accused of racism and bad behaviour to women.]

Yes. I could talk about this for ever, which is a bad sign. There were faculty members here in Cambridge saying we shouldn’t read Larkin. What the fuck does that mean? Who else are you recommending we don’t read?

My reaction was, and is, people shouldn’t do this. It’s scary. If you are sensitive to language at all, I can’t see how you can’t admire him on some level. The connection between poetry and morality somehow got firmly established in the English university system through [the critic] F R Leavis; poetry came to have to do with virtue.

Personally, I’ve always thought that English literary history suffers from its shortage of villains. It needs more bastards in the [John Wilmot, Earl of] Rochester mould. But that said, while Larkin shouldn’t have said those things, he was [outwardly] the model of a gentleman. It’s impossible to imagine him being rude, or even sharp to someone.

I think there are various big and obvious reasons why some people wanted to diminish him. One would be his enviable reputation. Another would be the fact that he just didn’t cooperate. He stayed in Hull. London literary life wasn’t for him.

That life was for you, though, wasn’t it?

Ha, yes. I enjoyed it, the whole business. The argy-bargy. The tangle. My rivals, even.

And Larkin’s poems sail on, don’t they?

Yes, and that’s the loudest thing to say. Though it could have been a near-run thing, they won through.

If we were on a desert island, what Larkin poems would we want?

First of all, I’d be trying to attract your attention. So it would be the romantic ones. But … we’re on a desert island! I’d already have your attention.

No, there are so many. I’d have The Whitsun Weddings, Aubade, Church Going, Mr Bleaney, Dockery and Son, To the Sea, An Arundel Tomb, At Grass – it’s fabulous – Next, Please. His range of evocation is unmatched since metaphysical times, and he has – people forget this – such a feeling for the countryside, puttering along in his very unpowerful car.

What about death? Larkin is preoccupied with it, and I wonder what you feel about that, now.

My family was marked by tragedy [James’s father, a prisoner of war in Japan, was later killed when a plane bringing POWs home crashed in Manila Bay]. But I, personally, have been marked by all the blessings. I’m giving thanks for life now, which isn’t much like despair, is it?

But Larkin was different. He knew it would end in silence, and he was afraid of the silence. He didn’t like the idea of not being here. I’m not like that – and my death might come as a relief to quite a few people. I’d rather like it not to hurt, that’s all.

Will you write another book?

Suppose I did another volume of memoirs…

Would you like to?

Yes, but I don’t think I have the energy. I’ve been hit in the face by a cricket bat at 1,000 miles an hour. I think the last round-up is here. But that’s OK. It would be bad manners to complain. I’ve had a lucky life, and I’m grateful for it.

THE GUARDIAN 

Vargas Llosa / A master of humour and humanity

Mario Vargas Llosa
by Alejandro Cabeza

Mario Vargas Llosa: a master of humour and humanity
BIOGRAPHY

by Robert McCrum

The Peruvian writer of novels with spellbinding narrative power has also taken on the comic romp and politics, through his books and via a presidential bid

Thursday 7 October 2010 18.42 BST

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or many readers Mario Vargas Llosa has been the most approachable and exhilarating Latin American writer of our times. For his many fans, of whom I am one, the recognition by the Swedish academy is long overdue. Throughout his career Vargas Llosa has always had the demeanour of a great writer on a quasi-Victorian scale, addressing the great issues of the day through the exercise of his imagination but refracted through the prism of modernism and post-modernism. William Faulkner remains a lifelong influence. In 1994 his importance to the Hispanic world was acknowledged when he won the Miguel de Cervantes prize.

As well as regularly publishing novels of spellbinding narrative power (notably The War of the End of the World and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta), he has also engaged passionately with the politics of his time in journalism, essays and even political thrillers.

Although as a young man he supported Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution, in 1990 he ran for the presidency of Peru as a moderate reformer. When that quixotic bid failed, swamped by the late populist surge of Alberto Fujimori, he withdrew from national politics but continued to explore the complex dissonances of South American politics. In the words of the Nobel citation, his fiction is obsessed with "the cartography of structures of power and trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat".

One of many disarming qualities of Vargas Llosa – the globetrotting expatriate and family man – is that allied to his fierce engagement with the society of which he is a part is a witty, often wry detachment that colours all his work with humour and profound humanity. The "Mario" of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comic romp that was adapted by Hollywood as Tune in Tomorrow, is as real and vivid as the polemical author of Death in the Andes. To assuage his lifelong passion for football he has written about the game for El País.

Winning this prize can be, for the new laureate, a terrible distraction. Vargas Llosa will, I suspect, take it in his stride. He has a natural grace in the public arena, an appetite for crowds, a remarkable command of English, plus an instinctive preference for a literary routine, combined with a love of travel.

He is also a passionate anglophile who prefers to write in the reading room of the British library and has kept an apartment in Knightsbridge with his wife, Patricia, for more than 30 years. He says he likes the anonymity he can enjoy in the streets of London. As a popular Nobel laureate he may find, in the near future, that it's more difficult to be incognito.

THE GUARDIAN

Woody Allen / "The Heart Wants What It Wants"

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow

"The Heart Wants What It Wants"

By WALTER ISAACSON

Sunday, June 24, 2001

Q. How could you get involved with someone who was almost a daughter?

A. I am not Soon-Yi's father or stepfather. I've never even lived with Mia. I've never in my entire life slept at Mia's apartment, and I never even used to go over there until my children came along seven years ago. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.

Q. But wasn't it breaking many bonds of trust to become involved with your lover's daughter?

A. There's no downside to it. The only thing unusual is that she's Mia's daughter. But she's an adopted daughter and a grown woman. I could have met her at a party or something.

Q. Were you still romantically involved with Mia when you became interested in Soon-Yi?

A. My relationship with Mia was simply a cordial one in the past four years, a dinner maybe once a week together. Our romantic relationship tapered off after the birth of Satchel, tapered off quickly.

Q. What was your relationship with Soon-Yi when you first started going over there to visit your children?

A. I never had a single extended conversation with her. As a matter of fact, I don't even think she liked me too much. The last thing I was interested in was the whole parcel of Mia's children.

Q. Why did you want to have children with Mia?

A. I didn't. She adopted Dylan, I didn't. But a month after she was there, I found myself bonding with her. She was just the greatest little girl. Suddenly I got tuned into the joys of parenthood. When Mia said it would be nice if she had someone else, I think I'll adopt another child, I said great. And coincidentally she got pregnant shortly after that. I was delighted.

Q. But then what happened to your relationship?

A. The relationship was starting to wane anyhow. Dylan's arrival sort of resuscitated it for a while; we had something in common, co-parenting the kids. But when Satchel came along, it drifted down to a polite and cordial end.

Q. But didn't you become a father surrogate to the children she had adopted with Andre Previn?

A. I was not involved with the other kids. They had their own father. I didn't spend much time with them, particularly the girls. I spent absolutely zero time with any of them. This was not some type of family unit in any remote way.

Q. Soon-Yi never treated you as a father figure?

A. Not remotely. She never said two words to me. For years I thought Soon-Yi was studying to be a nun. She was going to Sacred Heart, so I thought, well, I had no idea what she was doing. I was only interested in my own kids.

Q. Don't you worry about what the children might feel when their dad is sleeping with someone they consider a sister?

A. I don't think they think of "sleeping with." They only know what is constantly drummed into them. And I don't think my children feel any lack of affection or any rivalry. Soon-Yi and I will be very, very cognizant of their situation and feelings.

Q. Is Soon-Yi mentally handicapped in some way, as some have said?

A. No! Am I going to spend my time with a mental deficient? I mean, use your head. What would be the interest? She is not a mental deficient in any remote way. She goes to college, she is a psychology major, she has a B average.

Q. No learning disability?

A. Yes, a learning disability. I don't know what. She came here when she was seven and didn't know the language.

Q. How did your relationship with her begin?

A. One night, just fortuitously, I was over at Mia's, and I had no one to go to the basketball game with. And Soon-Yi said, I'll go. And so I took her, and I found her interested and delightful. This was a couple of years ago. Mia had encouraged me to get to know her. She would say, Take a walk with Soon-Yi, do something with her. Try and make friends with her, she's not really as hostile to you as you might think. Mia thought it was fine I took her to the game.

Q. So then you started secretly dating her?

* A. No. I took her to a game again, maybe a month later. And this happened on a few occasions. And we struck up a relationship. It was strictly -- I don't want to say an intellectual relationship, because I'm not saying we were discussing Kant or anything, but we chatted about different things.

Q. Did you talk about Mia?

A. Well, yes, I'm not sure I want to get into that too deeply, but she told me things that were surprising to me about the family, and that it was not exactly as happy as I thought it was. She and other kids had problems with their mother. Soon-Yi did not have a good relationship with her, and we spoke about that. She said her mother had been very cruel to her.

Q. Physically?

A. Physically, and mentally. Mia was very impatient with her. She had hit her with a brush. She had written English words on her hand because she couldn't learn them, and made her go to school with them on her hand, and that humiliated her. I believe also she threatened to put Soon-Yi into an institution because she was impatient with her for having trouble learning the language. There were many other things. But I don't want to say, because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But if I do have to say them someday, I will.

Q. But she may have been telling you these things because she was interested in you or trying to get back at her mother. How do you know they were true?

A. Because when I made it my business to check about it, I found out. She was worse to Soon-Yi because she stood up to her. And there was a definite difference in the way she treated the adopted children and her own children.

Q. How did your sexual relationship with Soon-Yi come about?

A. We'd chat when I came over to Mia's house. It started to become hotter and heavier late last year, very late. We had a number of conversations, saw a couple of movies, and you know it just -- well, I can't say there was any cataclysmic moment.

Q. But you fell in love with her?

A. Yes, yes. My flair for drama. What can I say?

Q. She fell in love with you at the same time?

A. That's hard to say. My guess is after. She returned my feelings.

Q. But didn't it occur to you, worry you, that her feeling had something to do with her resentment of her mother?

A. I did not think that. I never think of those things. When you're having a nice time, you don't look for those motivations.

Q. Weren't you worried that the emotions and motivations were too complex for a young girl?

A. No. Because if you knew her, you'd know that's not true. She's a sharp, grownup person. She's probably more mature than I am. I really mean that.

Q. Your movies always explore these types of emotions and motives. You must have sat up one night and thought about the problems you might cause dating the daughter of a previous lover, a mother she doesn't like?

A. I didn't think about her not liking Mia. I did think that, well, she is the adoptive daughter of my previous girlfriend, but that didn't mean anything to me. It didn't manifest itself in any significant way. She was a grown, sophisticated person. She was raised in New York.

Q. You're a guy who can find moral dilemmas in a broken DON'T WALK sign. Didn't you see some here?

A. I didn't find any moral dilemmas whatsoever. I didn't feel that just because she was Mia's daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import. It wasn't like she was my daughter.

Q. Did you ever discuss with her, "What is Mom going to think of this?"

A. Mom would have thought more or less the same thing if it had been my secretary or an actress.

Q. Come on!

A. There is a different psychodynamic here, without any question, but the difference is one of small degree. If I had said to "Mom" -- it was actually "Mia" that she called her -- I'm in love with my secretary, there would have been some version of the same thing.

Q. But you didn't tell Mia before it blew up, right?

A. I wanted to make sure this thing was going to take off. For all I knew I might have just been a little footnote in Soon-Yi's life, and then she would later say, Well, I had a little flirtation with my mother's boyfriend at the end of their relationship.

Q. Did you talk to your analyst about how this would affect a child?

A. It wasn't so complex. It doesn't have that quality to it that you think.

Q. What about how it would affect her siblings?

A. These people are a collection of kids, they are not blood sisters or anything. If Mia did not keep them whipped up and enraged these days, telling them how to react, I don't think they would have cared two seconds.

Q. Did you really take nude pictures of Soon-Yi?

A. Yes. Soon-Yi had talked about being a model and said to me would I take some pictures of her without her clothes on. At this time we had an intimate relationship, so I said sure, and I did. It was just a lark of a moment.

Q. What did Mia do when she found them?

A. She hit the ceiling. I said, Look, our relationship has been over for some time. We should go our separate ways. The important thing is that we do what is right for our children. She was too angry. She instantly brought all the kids in on it, told all of them. This was Jan. 13. It was a dreadful thing to do. She phoned people saying I had molested her daughter, raped her daughter.

Q. What did she do with Soon-Yi?

A. She locked Soon-Yi in the bedroom in her apartment -- there's a lot of corroboration of this -- beat her on numerous occasions, smashed her with a chair, kicked her, raised black-and-blue marks so the kids at school said, Where did you get those? Finally, through the intervention of, I believe, a doctor, she got out of the house and went to live up in the college dormitory.

Q. Did you talk to Soon-Yi while this was happening?

A. She called me once when she could get to a phone and told me she was fine, that her mother would say she was suicidal, but it's untrue. I love you, and I don't regret a minute of this.

Q. Why did the whole thing become public?

A. Suddenly I got a memo from her lawyers saying no more visits at all. Something had taken place. When I called Mia, she just slammed down the phone. And then I was told by my lawyers she was accusing me of child molestation. I thought this was so crazy and so sick that I cannot in all conscience leave those kids in that atmosphere. So I said, I realize this is going to be rough, but I'm going to sue for custody of the children.

Q. Did you molest your daughter?

A. I have not molested my daughter, nor would I ever.

Q. What did happen in the house?

A. It was a Wednesday two weeks ago. I came in the midafternoon for a visit. Allegedly, I took her in the attic, according to what the child-protection agency told me was the allegation, and did unspeakable things to her. But nothing at all happened. Nothing. In light-years I wouldn't go into an attic, I wouldn't even know how to find Mia's attic. I'm a famous claustrophobic. And I would not molest my daughter.

Q. Were you ever with her alone?

A. I may have been with her alone for a second, a moment or something, but I wasn't really alone with her. I am not going to, on the eve of hammering out a separation agreement, drive to Connecticut and in Mia's house, an open house, where there are two baby-sitters and people are always walking in and out, I'm not going to take her and molest her.

Q. Mia was there?

A. Of course she was there.

Q. There must have been some incident, some basis for this charge?

A. No, nothing. I was never in a private room with Dylan. I slept downstairs that night in the guest bedroom. The next morning when I was about to leave, the kids ran downstairs and were jumping all over me and playing with me. And Dylan gave me some brochure from a toy store and she had checked off some toys she wanted me to get for her. Everything was wonderful.

Q. Have you seen Dylan's videotape?

A. No. And don't you think that's strange, that Mia made a videotape?

Q. Was there any other evidence?

A. She brought the kid to the doctor, and there is no physical evidence of anything.

Q. Then why do you think Mia and Dylan made the allegation?

A. The atmosphere up there in Connecticut is so rife with rage against me. So it's possible this emerged from that. But it also could have been made up intentionally.

Q. Have you talked to Mia recently?

A. Yes, in fact she called me five times today ((Friday)).

Q. What do you say to each other?

A. She said, Can we stop this grotesque publicity circus? And I said, You have hired a lawyer, you're parading relatives and the kids on television, you leaked this videotape of Dylan unconscionably. She said, Can't we negotiate this? And I said, First you must clear my name unequivocally. And if you do that and we can agree to give Dylan some real therapy to get over the dreadful scars of this thing, and I am part supervisor of that therapy, then O.K., we can see if there's a way of toning things down.

Q. Do you use your movies to work through dilemmas you're facing in life?

A. No, people always confuse my movies and my life.

Q. But don't you confuse your movies and your life?

A. No. Movies are fiction. The plots of my movies don't have any relationship to my life. My next movie is a murder mystery.

Q. Who's going to get murdered?

A. Oh, some stranger.

Q. Inappropriate love with younger women seems to be a theme in your movies and in your life, right?

A. It's not a theme in my life. I've been married twice, both times to women practically my age. My two other relationships -- Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow -- they're not really much younger women.

Q. Will your relationship with Soon-Yi continue?

A. Yes. I'm in love with her. As soon as the reporters go away, we'll do the things we like to do. We'll walk and eat out and go to the movies and basketball games.

Q. What's your emotional bond, since it's not intellectual?

A. It's fully dimensional. I would not be interested in someone who's not interesting.

Q. Do you consider it a healthy, equal relationship?

A. Well, who knows? It's perfectly healthy. But I don't think equal is necessarily a desideratum. Sometimes equality in a relationship is great, sometimes inequality makes it work. But it's an equal-opportunity relationship. I mean, I'm not equal to her in certain ways.

The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that.

TIME

Anne Enright / The Green Road / An exquisite collage of Irish lives

The Green Road by Anne Enright review – an exquisite collage of Irish lives

A reunion dominates this moving family drama but it’s the distinct individual stories that fascinate


Alex Preston
Sunday 3 May 2015 09.00 BST

A

nne Enright’s first novels were whimsical, mannered, driven by plot devices that might have come from the discarded first drafts of the magic realists. They were redeemed by her style – always precise and deft and lyrical. A brief foray into non-fiction, 2004’s Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, seemed to mark a turning point for Enright, and the Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007) moved away from the Angela Carter-inspired early work to give a stunning present-day portrait of a family in mourning. The Forgotten Waltz (2011), about the fallout from an affair, cemented her reputation as the leading chronicler of contemporary Irish life (without quite reaching the heights of its predecessor). Now we have The Green Road, which is very much of a part with her previous two novels, dealing with the shabby materialism of the Celtic tiger generation, with the Irish diaspora, with family.

Enright often feels as if she’s playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do – the boxes that must be ticked in order to satisfy some Anglo-American dream of Ireland. She writes about the stereotypical Irish family in a fine passage in The Gathering: “There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, like trends, they shift. Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them.”

Rather than a single protagonist, The Green Road is told through a family, the third-person perspective (which occasionally slips into the familial “we”) moving between the five living members of the Madigan clan: the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna. Like The Gathering, the plot hinges on a reunion – the family coming together for Christmas for the first time in years. Of the children, only Constance has remained in their anonymous home town in west Clare, the others flung far across the globe. Rosaleen, it seems, is thinking of cashing in on the Irish property boom (the year is 2005, before the bank runs and the bailouts). This Christmas may be their last chance to celebrate together in the family home.

In The Gathering, the narrator, Veronica, goes over the events of her life, of that of her brother, trying to understand “what hurt may linger in the bones”, inventing that which she cannot know. The Green Road operates quite differently, showing us the Madigan children in early incarnations – Hanna, a quizzing schoolgirl who smells on her father “the day’s work: fresh air, diesel, hay, with the memory of cattle in there somewhere, and beyond that again the memory of milk”. We see Dan in the New York art scene of the 1990s, a wonderful chapter that glows with nostalgia and feeling. We meet Constance in 1997, a mother of young children, dealing with the small joys and disappointments of her circumscribed life. Finally we find Emmet, an aid worker in Mali, endlessly drifting. The novel then leaps ahead to show us the four children all older, all damaged. We are given a few clues about the intervening years, but largely we must fill in the gaps, write our own history of the family that explains “the horrors of the Madigans – their small hearts… and the small lives they put themselves through.” It’s a neat conceit thatCarol Shields uses in The Stone Diaries, a family saga that kept coming to mind as I read The Green Road. It draws the reader into the story, making us imaginative co-conspirators in the creation of its fictional world.

In many ways, The Green Road works best if we think of it as a series of short stories (Enright is feted in the shorter form). The section about Dan in New York stands on its own as a masterful evocation of time and place – the moment I finished the novel, I went back and re-immersed myself in the art and the sex and the melancholy of Dan’s early life. Emmet’s story in Mali is as intricate, sparse and dark as anything in JM Coetzee. Hanna’s childhood and her later breakdown tread that line of Irish literary cliche with delicious knowingness, giving us the sense of an author in full control of the layers of meaning in her work. The reunion at the end of the novel, and the dramatic disappearance that shuttles us through the final pages, feel like unnecessary McGuffins, put there to appease the conventions of plot when the book is far more interesting, and more moving, when.

THE GUARDIAN