Because it's like walking into an Edward Hopper painting.
-
Historic Saint Paul's preservation consultant Aaron Rubinstein,
describing why people should patronize the Original Coney Island
Restaurant & Bar on St. Peter Street (Feb. 2017).
Does
it make sense for someone like me, who reads maybe six to eight novels a
year, to post about books? If Momma Cuandito, a prodigious reader of
many genres, had a blog, she would probably write more about books than I
do about films.
After I posted my February 17 story about trudging through Moby-Dick,
I should have considered my quota of book posts fulfilled for 2017.
But, I read a review recently about a short story anthology which was
curated with such an original theme that I had to checkadoo for myself.
While in Arizona last month for two weeks without the print edition of a
newspaper to read, I filled the gap with In Sunlight Or In Shadow.
It is a compilation of seventeen stories, ranging from eight to
thirty-five pages, commissioned by Lawrence Block. What makes the
anthology remarkable isn't necessarily the quality of the stories
themselves or the bona fides of the authors he selected, but the
procedure Block used to arrive at the finished product.
We
begin with the famous American artist, Edward Hopper. Smithsonian
Magazine, in a 2007 article by Avis Berman, called Hopper "the supreme
American realist of the twentieth century." Although internationally
famous, the enigmatic Hopper spent almost all of his life in New York.
The period of his greatest accomplishments was roughly from the end of
World War I to the early 1950's. He was skilled in many different
disciplines, with oil painting being his forte. His focus was on color
and light. Many of Hopper's works showed landscapes, urban architecture
and seascapes, but what attracted Block for purposes of the anthology
he curated was the collection of Hopper's pictures conveying people in
seemingly unremarkable circumstances, e.g., a woman sitting on a bed in a
drab hotel room, a few city dwellers gathered around the counter of a
late night diner, or a young couple conversing on the front porch of an
old house. In his foreward, Block states that Hopper's paintings don't
tell a story as much as they suggest a story to the imaginations of the
viewers.
With that in mind, Block invited
eighteen of his favorite writers --"A-listers," he calls them -- to
contribute to the anthology project. Each writer selected a Hopper
painting, then created a story inspired by that writer's contemplation
of the picture. In some cases, the connection between the painting and
the story is obvious, such as Rooms By The Sea by Nicholas
Christopher, a mysterious story about the happenings inside a house
which overlooks the ocean, based on Hopper's 1951 painting of the same
title. But the more fascinating stories are those for which the author
was inspired, but not directed, by what she saw on the canvas.
Each
of the seventeen stories is immediately preceded by a full page color
plate of the related Hopper work, and by an introduction, most of which
are presumably written by Block, describing the credentials of the
author. Every author has had her works published numerous times in
various media, and is the recipient of many awards, such as the Edgar
Award (for mystery writers), the Bram Stoker Award (dark fantasy and
horror), the O. Henry Award (short stories), and the Spur Award
(westerns). I must admit that the only three with whom I am very
familiar are Stephen King, whose story, The Music Room, has the
kind of edginess and creepiness one might expect from a writer with his
reputation, Lee Child, mostly famous for creating the Jack Reacher
series --two of the twenty-one Reacher novels have been made into movies
-- and Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific popular author who, it is often
said, is impossible to pigeon hole into a particular style. Block,
himself, contributes a story, as does Gail Levin, who authored the
seminal biography of Hopper titled Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. Ironically, it is Levin's contribution, The Preacher Collects, which I found to be the only clunker in the seventeen story collection.
As Block describes in his short but entertaining foreward, "the stories are in various genres, or in no genre at all." Many
stories center on women, sometimes in peril, sometimes with revenge as a
motive for their decisions. A couple of stories have surprise endings,
a few leave us dangling without closure. At least two border on the
supernatural, such as the narration coming from a dead person, or a
house which geometrically expands annually without construction work.
It would be hard to come up with three favorites, or even one, but if
you are the kind of book browser who spends time reading a passage or a
chapter before laying down your purchase money, I would suggest The Projectionist by Joe E. Lansdale, and Autumn At The Automat by the curator himself, Mr. Block. The inspiration for The Projectionist was a 1939 painting by Hopper titled New York Movie,
which also functions as the dust jacket's cover picture. The title
character is the narrator, an uneducated male film buff in his
twenties. He's learned his trade from the former retired projectionist,
Bert. The theater is owned by an elderly couple who are approached and
threatened for protection money by gangsters. The narrator witnesses
the shakedown and goes to Bert for help. Secrets are revealed and
surprises ensue.
In Autumn At The Automat, the story concocted by Block having admired Hopper's 1927 Autumn,
the lesson to be learned is that things are not always as they seem.
To reveal too much here would be a disservice to the author and you.
This is the kind of story you might have seen in the old television
series The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
A side benefit of reading In Sunlight Or In Shadow
is that I added at least one new word to my vocabulary: frontispiece.
Perhaps I am telling you something you already know, but a frontispiece
is a picture that is inserted between the front cover of a book and the
first chapter (or in this case, the first story). The frontispiece to
Block's collection is the 1950 Hopper painting Cape Cod Morning.
According to my North Dakota high school math, I calculated that as a
result of that picture's inclusion, we have eighteen Hopper paintings
but only seventeen stories. Block explains the discrepancy in his
foreward. His original plan was to have eighteen writers (including
himself) write stories based on a Hopper work which they chose. Block
and his publisher, Pegasus Books, secured all the required permissions
to reprint those paintings. But the best laid plans go asunder, or so
we are told, and the writer who chose Cape Cod Morning could not
deliver -- for undisclosed reasons. Block, tongue in cheek, invites us
to create our own story to go with that painting. "But," he cautions,
"don't tell it to me. I'm outta here."
Two
footnotes, if you will... The introductory quote from Aaron Rubinstein
was pulled from an article written by Star Tribune food critic Rick
Nelson on February 4, 2017. Nelson was covering the re-opening of the
Original Coney Island Restaurant in conjunction with the St. Paul Winter
Carnival. Located at 444 St. Peter Street, the Coney Island had not
been open to the public since 1994. Nelson describes the place as
"meticulously preserved in a dipped-in-amber-like state." It is housed
in two adjacent buildings, one of which was built in 1858. Besides
functioning as a restaurant, over the decades the space has served as a
saloon, a hotel, an arsenal and an armory. Here is the kicker:
Although the Coney Island has been rented occasionally since 2011 for
private parties, the restaurant's opening was for one day only, February
4.
Second, scholars have identified over
eight hundred paintings as being the work of Edward Hopper. A
retrospective of his art, including, inter alia, one hundred of those
paintings, can be viewed next year at the Art Institute Of Chicago from
February 16 to May 11, following stops in Boston and Washington, D.C.
