New Favorite Song: "Needle in a Haystack" by the Velvelettes

Maybe I've got girl groups on the brain because it's the 10th anniversary of my singing girl-group pastiche songs in Little Shop of Horrors. But then, you know, I've always had a weakness for the girl-group style. So when I heard an obscure but totally awesome Motown girl-group song last week (thanks to Lauren Laverne on BBC 6) it made my day. This is my new jam: "Needle in a Haystack" by the Velvelettes.



I love the backing vocals, love the harmonies, love the stomping rhythm. I listen to it over and over and try to decide whether the lyrics can be interpreted in a proto-feminist way (a girl warning her friends to stay away from men who are bad news) or whether they're just garden-variety early-60s sexism (assuming that men have just one thing on their minds and girls ought to "play hard to get").

Oh, who am I kidding. Really, I listen to it over and over because it's a great Motown pop song. I think it deserves to be much more widely known, so give it a listen, why don't you?

Hitting the Sweet Spot of the Nostalgia Cycle

It seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. [...] Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.

--Adam Gopnik, "The Forty-Year Itch," The New Yorker, April 23, 2012

My play Pleiades is set in 1971. I didn't know about the forty-year nostalgia cycle when I was writing it, but I definitely felt that there was... something extra-resonant about writing about that era. It was a conscious effort to write a play about my mother's generation of women when they were my age: early twenties, not quite fully formed, finding their way. While I don't think that Pleiades betrays much genuine nostalgia for the early '70s (Gopnik's definition: the belief that an era "is not simply a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you") it does feel like we're coming to a time in our culture when we can reevaluate the '70s. When I was growing up in the '90s, my mother would dismiss the '70s as a decade of bad fashion, bad music, and bad faith. But I have to believe there's more to it than that.

Pleiades was my effort to write about my mother's generation as young women; The Rose of Youth, my '30s play, was about my grandmothers' generation. (Here's a post I wrote in 2007 discussing the parallels between Grandma's generation and my own.) Forty years in the past, and eighty years in the past. Yes, there's something to Gopnik's theory.

The new season of Mad Men prompted this New Yorker piece on nostalgia. Can I just say that the use of music in Mad Men is making me feel better about the way I used music in Pleiades? The play is bookended with two songs from a Judy Collins album, which set the mood and make thematic points, but I wondered if I was being too obvious and predictable. (Seven young women in 1971 -- of course they listen to Judy Collins!) But then I realized that Mad Men isn't always subtle in its musical cues either -- and it's not a problem. "Satisfaction" in Season 4, or "Tomorrow Never Knows" last Sunday, are iconic songs that suit the show, the themes, the characters. And I'm glad that they form part of the Mad Men sonic landscape -- that they've been deemed necessary and appropriate, rather than predictable and obvious.

Though I also appreciate how they mix iconic songs with more obscure ones -- I know a thing or two about yé-yé music, but I'd never heard "Zou Bisou Bisou" before it appeared in the Mad Men season premiere!

I do need to do a new draft of Pleiades, but Judy Collins won't get edited out.

The British Invasion comes to "Mad Men"

Last Sunday, shortly before 10 PM, my roommate put on the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" and began to fold her laundry. Since I can't resist the '60s Stones, I came into her room and we had an impromptu dance party. After "Paint It Black" we listened to "Sympathy for the Devil," hoo-hooing in harmony.

10 PM, that is, the start of the new season of Mad Men, was drawing nearer, and we had time for just one more song. (I am a Mad Men devotee; my roommate had never seen it but was curious to check it out.) "In that case," I said, "we have GOT to listen to 'Satisfaction.'"

For what could be more appropriate? It occurred to me a few months ago that "Satisfaction" is like the theme song of Mad Men. Isn't the show about people in the '60s who all, for various reasons, can't get no satisfaction? Not to mention Mick Jagger's anti-advertising rant: "When I'm watching my TV / And the man comes on to tell me / How white my shirts can be / But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke / The same cigarettes as me"--doesn't that just reinforce the Mad Men theme?

Season 3 of Mad Men ended in December 1963. Privately, I thought it would be amazing if Season 4 jumped ahead to the summer of 1965, when "Satisfaction" was the big hit song (according to my father, it "played all up and down the New Jersey shore"), and the first thing we heard in the new season was the Stones' vamping guitars and sneering vocals. More than anything else, this would signal that the angst and rebellion so commonly associated with the '60s had come crashing upon the scene. Totally visceral, totally rock-and-roll.

As it turns out, Season 4 begins in November 1964, too early for "Satisfaction." But I wouldn't be surprised if the song turns up in a later episode this season (although perhaps that's too predictable for Matthew Weiner and co.?). Furthermore, I loved how this week's episode ended with a more obscure British Invasion song playing over the end credits: "Tobacco Road" by the Nashville Teens. While I wasn't familiar with the song, I instantly recognized it as having that distinctive British Invasion sound. It was like a whole new sonic world had suddenly opened up.

So watching Mad Men has helped me understand just why the Beatles and the Stones and the other British Invasion bands had the impact that they did--they truly brought a new musical style across the pond. It also helps me understand why "Satisfaction" became such a big hit: it's not only due to the catchy guitar riff. Its lyrics really struck a nerve!

My "Mad" Scene

That's me on the right, the latest addition to the Sterling Cooper steno pool. It may be a madhouse (pun intended) but at least I have my coffee, my newspaper, and my lovely Sassoon-style haircut to get me through the workday...

Image via the rather addictive MadMenYourself generator. H/t Tim.

Also, you know how Banana Republic is rolling out a big Mad Men promotion right now? Did I not write here, almost a year ago, that I had bought a black BR dress that I thought of as my "Joan Holloway Goes to a Funeral" dress? Maybe I should be working in advertising and coming up with these tie-ins!

Understandable madness

I don't watch much TV (in fact I think this is the first time I'm discussing it on my blog) but on Sunday nights I make an exception for Mad Men. People wearing clothes more fabulous than I will ever wear, dealing with more guilt, secrets, and prejudice than I hope I shall ever have to bear! Oh how I love it.

When I watch Mad Men with my mom, that means I'm sitting next to someone who lived in the NY metro area at the time the show takes place. In fact, my mom grew up in Montclair, NJ, so we were excited when last night's episode began with a party at Paul's new house in Montclair. Paul, one of the younger admen, is affecting a "hip" lifestyle--he's moved to Montclair because Greenwich Village is already too passé for him. He has also started dating Sheila, an African-American woman who works at a supermarket. I'll be interested to see if their relationship gains more of a presence on the show as the Civil Rights movement heats up...

Sheila says that she is from South Orange and works at Food Fair--two details that my mom considered spot-on, because South Orange was a predominantly black town and Food Fair a major NJ supermarket chain. And the show also referenced the fact that Montclair is famous for a collection of George Innes paintings--though why did Paul say "Montclair Art Gallery" instead of the correct "Montclair Art Museum"? Perhaps this is just supposed to be one more (very subtle) hint that he is a poser, I said to Mom.

My parents were children at the time Mad Men takes place, and they were a few socioeconomic rungs below Don Draper's family--yet the show helps me to understand the world they came from. Last night's episode ended with a Mass in Latin. This is what my parents grew up hearing, but even though I was raised Catholic, I had never heard a Latin Mass. Strange and wonderful all at once.


Mad Men also appeals to my sense of historical imagination. I often ask myself what I would have done had I lived in a time or place that is less accepting of women's rights--and wonder if my gay and lesbian friends ask themselves what they would have done if they, too, lived in a less tolerant culture. We, we good 21st-century feminists and gay-rights activists, all like to think that we would have spoken out against injustice and prejudice at every turn. We would have had the common sense and the belief in human dignity that people in the olden days lacked! We would have been different! And there is a trend in middlebrow historical novels and such to portray heroines as "feisty" or "liberated" or "modern" beyond all reasonable probability.

But in reality, you know, most of us would have accepted the norms and values of our culture, not fought against them--just as most of us don't fight wholesale against the culture we live in today, even if we recognize its flaws. Instead, we pick our battles, we avoid causing a ruckus, we use more subtle tactics, and we realize that compromise is often necessary.

And so, had we lived in 1962, many of us wouldn't even have been discontented (I read an essay last semester about how bourgeois women in 1800s France weren't a bunch of frustrated Emma Bovarys--they were perfectly happy raising their children, going to church, upholding strict moral standards). And if we were discontented, we might've had Betty's very Feminine Mystique-y malaise: a secret despair whose root cause we could not identify. We wouldn't have been able to see the forces that hemmed us in. Or maybe, if we were more ambitious, we would have worked within the established system to get ahead--becoming manipulative and foxy like Joan. Very, very few of us would have been like Peggy--breaking into traditionally male professions and wanting respect on our own terms.

And Peggy could so easily have become one of those irritatingly modern-seeming female characters--the "secretly brilliant woman whom everyone else underestimates." Well, yes, that's a part of who she is, but Mad Men never hesitates to show that a woman in her position is still defined by her compromises and sacrifices. Last night's episode showed her kissing a cute guy at Paul's party then turning him down--because she has learned the hard way that she cannot afford love (or even, it seems, friendship). The show pays similar attention to the sacrifices made by Salvatore, the closeted gay art director who has a new wife. When I watch Mad Men, I think about what I would have done if I were in Peggy's or Salvatore's position--and though it is easy for us modern viewers to disagree with the choices they make, can any of us really say that we would have been able to do better?

Photo 1: Paul, Sheila and Joan. Photo 2: Salvatore and Peggy. Images from amctv.com

Mai 1968: À bas le vieux monde

It's 40 years since Mai '68, the month of student uprisings and labor strikes in France aimed at bringing the optimistic idealism of the 1960s to the conservative French government. Since the French love nothing more than self-analysis and philosophizing, I am sure that the newspapers there are filled with articles comparing the national mindset then and now. Meanwhile, the Vassar French department got in on the act, posting Mai '68 slogans in the cafeteria. (You can read many such slogans translated on Wikisource and untranslated on this Belgian site.) There were also blank posters inviting us to create slogans for Mai '08. After some thought, I took a pen out of my bag and scrawled

AUX ARMES CITOYENS
AUX ARTS CITOYENS
AUX ARBRES CITOYENS
A L'ARDEUR CITOYENS

(To arms, citizens / To the arts, citizens / To the trees, citizens / With ardor, citizens)

A small crowd gathered to watch me graffiti. I refused to write the English translation, to explain myself, or even really to make eye contact. I capped my pen, turned on my heel, and walked calmly away, leaving people to puzzle things out for themselves. I figured this was in the proper revolutionary spirit.

As for my slogan, it probably wouldn't have passed muster in Mai '68--an era that hated all references to old patriotic traditions ("Aux armes citoyens" is, of course, a line in the Marseillaise) and scorned the notion that art could save us. Slogans from the time included "Lisez moins, vivez plus" (Read less, live more) and "La culture est l'inversion de la vie" (Culture is the inverse of life). But I DO believe in art--maybe that's a flaw of mine, that I am naturally an aesthete, not a revolutionary. In fact, you might sum me up with another Mai '68 slogan: "Je suis marxiste, tendance Groucho" (I'm a Marxist--the Groucho kind).

I prefer art to polemics, and I do believe you can separate the two. In Mai '68, film director François Truffaut was joining the protests and helping to shut down the Cannes Film Festival--but he was also making a light-as-air romantic comedy, the wonderful Stolen Kisses (my IMDB review). Stolen Kisses has the spirit of 1960s youthful optimism, but I can relate to it because it's not specifically concerned with the day-to-day problems of 1968. For that reason, I am much more interested in Truffaut's universal, humanistic outlook than in Godard's explicitly political and theoretical films.

Yes, film was a big part of the Mai '68 spirit, and to celebrate that, the French Department also sponsored an outdoor screening of Barbarella last week--another movie that doesn't explicitly tackle politics, but couldn't be a better expression of the free-love, down-with-authority '60s. I got excited as soon as the screening was announced.

See, my friends Molly and Thane introduced me to Barbarella last December, when they screened it to help people chill out during finals. I had my laptop in front of me, frantically trying to finish a draft of The Rose of Youth, and beside me Thane and Molly were yelling out their favorite Barbarella quotes and playing a drinking game: you take a sip every time Barbarella changes her outfit or has an orgasm. I adore a good campy movie, and as soon as I heard the first words of the opening song, "Barbarella, psychadella," I knew I was in for a treat.

The plan last week was to screen Barbarella in French with English subtitles, but that fell through, because the French dialogue track did not have subtitles. So, while I was a little disappointed not to hear Jane Fonda say "De-crucify the angel or I melt your face!" in French, I still had fun, watching the movie with Thane and Molly again, quoting along with them this time. We seemed to be the only people there who got the campy joke of Barbarella. Everyone else watched it politely, respectfully, raising their eyebrows at the silly parts, or just getting fed up with it--as if it were meant to be educational! The three of us giggled, and gleefully anticipated our favorite moments, and go-go-danced during the end credits.

There's kind of a coda to all this--if you want to over-extend the metaphor, a reminder that the '60s are long past. On Friday Thane e-mailed me that actor John Philip Law, who played the blind angel Pygar in Barbarella, has died at the age of 70. He's more of a lifeless pretty-boy than a real actor, but that means he provides some of the most amusing moments in the movie, with his spaced-out readings of hippie-dippy lines like "An angel does not make love, an angel is love." Indeed, despite the dubious quality of Law's acting, and of Barbarella, and of some Mai '68 slogans, I do feel a little sad that such statements never could occur today, neither in the movies nor graffitied in the streets.

Rauschenberg and the '60s

I am not extremely familiar with the artwork of Robert Rauschenberg, who died this week at the age of 82, but I do remember writing a short response to his silkscreen-collage, "Signs" (above) my senior year of high school.

Every year, my school would display a selection of prints borrowed from a wealthy art collector, and my senior year, my art history teacher had us choose a print from that year's art show and write about it. Out of all the interesting artwork on display, "Signs" fascinated me the most. I was amazed how it contains every image that we nowadays associate with The Sixties--the Kennedys, MLK, the space program, Vietnam, awesome music--yet Rauschenberg didn't have the benefit of much hindsight when he made the print, since it appeared in 1970.

Rauschenberg's prescience, his ability to distill a decade down to its essential people and its essential feelings--rage, grief, death coming before its time, the astronauts on the moon looking back at the Earth, that little conflict-ridden bauble hanging in the sky--convinced me that this was the work of a great artist. I first saw "Signs" in 2003 or 2004--now it's 2008 and I still don't know how I would visually sum up this decade in a way that would still resonate forty years from now.

Robert Rauschenberg grew up in the same Texas town as Janis Joplin, explaining her presence in this print. Evidently he created "Signs" as a magazine cover, though it was never used for that purpose. "It was conceived to remind us of the love, terror and violence of the last ten years. The danger lies in forgetting," he once said.

With memorials like these, I don't think there's any danger of forgetting the '60s.

I'm less certain about our own decade--which feels turbulent, too, but lacks the utopianism of the '60s, and so complex that it is impossible to distill things down to a few images. How would you describe the "look" of this decade, its symbols, its preoccupations? We can't even give it a name! And if naming something gives you power over it...well, then, we don't even have the power to take charge of our own era.

I said this to a friend the other day, who immediately retorted "The Aughts!" (He is an anglophile.)

"Half the people in this country don't know what that means," I said cynically. "And then what do we call the next decade? The Teens?--but then what about 2010, 2011? The Tens? No, I don't think things will get better till 2020. And then we'll still get depressed, because we'll realize it's been one hundred years since the 1920s, and we'll feel old."

On a more upbeat note, if you've got time and want to commemorate Rauschenberg, why not read Chuck Mee's exuberant homage, bobrauschenbergamerica? (Like all Mee's plays, it's available for free online). I had a good time at a student production of it last year. Rare to see a play that celebrates suburban Americana rather than denigrating or satirizing it!

Image from billsheppard.com

Whoa-oh-oh-oh, Da Doo Ron Ron

On Saturday I'll be in NYC again to see Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons (and maybe do some Christmas shopping). I'm excited: not only is playwright Jordan Harrison a great guy and a talented writer, but the subject of this play sounds right up my alley. It interweaves 3 stories: Richard Wagner writing Tristan and Isolde, a 1960s girl-group singer's career, and a contemporary gay man's coming of age. Y'all know that I'm in an opera phase right now (though I'm no Wagnerian) but it might surprise you that I absolutely love girl-group pop!

Probably this has something to do with playing a doo-wop girl in Little Shop of Horrors in high school and getting to sing Ashman & Menken's pastiche songs. Really, it's a great score; the choice to use girl-group music is just so perfect for the show's humor and its 1950s/1960s setting. And it parodies its sources just enough, never too much. In the opening number, we sang "Shing-a-ling, what a creepy thing to be happening. Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!" Only a few years later did I realize that that parodied the Shangri-Las' shouts in "Leader of the Pack."

This kind of music has also been heard on Broadway in Hairspray and Dreamgirls. Hairspray's "Mama I'm a Big Girl Now," with its three girls singing harmony and I-vi-iv-V chord structure, perfectly evokes the girl-group sound. It's one of my favorite songs in the score. However, I did not think that any of The Dreams' hit songs in Dreamgirls were as catchy or brilliant as the real deal from the Supremes. (More Dreamgirls carping here.)

Girl-group songs are a lot of fun, obviously, but their sweetness and innocence and adolescent heartbreak can also be quite affecting. When I went through my first quasi-relationship/quasi-breakup (eh, it was complicated) one thing that helped was listening to "Where Did Our Love Go?" and "You Can't Hurry Love" on repeat. Sounds clichéd, I know...but better than listening to emo.

It's funny that these songs should be this powerful, because they're the very definition of commercial music--written not from the depths of an artist's soul, but by teams of songwriters hoping to score a big hit. Much of the time, white adults wrote songs for young urban black girls to sing, which is a little creepy/exploitative (especially when said white man was Phil Spector!). At Motown the songwriters as well as the singers were black, but if anything, the "hitmaking machine" mentality was even more in effect.

Some people may scorn girl-group music because it's so commercial, but there's a lot of distinguished girl-group aficionados, too. They include:

Amy Winehouse: Her Grammy-nominated album (congrats Amy!) is heavily based around the classic girl-group sound: "Back to Black" might be the greatest Phil Spector song that Phil Spector never produced. But her voice gives it a modern twist: paradoxically, she's both more tough and more vulnerable than the typical poppy girl-group singer (the Shangri-Las excepted).



The Pipettes: A trio from the UK who is also contributing to the girl-group revival. Pretty, peppy, and polka-dotted, "Pull Shapes" ought to cheer you up if you just watched that funerary "Back to Black" video...



Martin Scorsese: Ever since seeing Goodfellas last summer I can't listen to "And Then He Kissed Me" without thinking of how it underscores the astounding tracking shot where Henry and Karen make their way into the Copacabana Club through the kitchen. Just ecstatically good filmmaking and music.



Tom Stoppard: His quasi-autobiographical character Henry, in The Real Thing, knows he "should" love difficult classical music, but really only likes the '60s pop hits from his youth. In one scene, he is trying to choose eight songs that are personally significant to him for the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs--but, ashamed of his musical tastes, is hunting for some more obscure tracks than the ones he usually listens to:

HENRY: I'm supposed to be one of your intellectual playwrights. I'm going to look like a total prick, aren't I, announcing that while I was telling Jean-Paul Sartre and the post-war French existentialists where they had got it wrong, I was spending the whole time listening to the Crystals singing "Da Doo Ron Ron."

That's one way of looking at it, Henry...or you could've been like Jordan Harrison, and put both your intellect and your love of girl-group music into one of your plays!

A rolling stone in Arcadia

Tom Stoppard has an article in the latest Vanity Fair that touches on his new play, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, and his writing process. You can tell from The Real Thing, and from the fact that his latest play is titled Rock 'n' Roll, that Stoppard is a big pop-music fan, but I really enjoyed this anecdote about just how music influences him:

With each play, I tend to become fixated on one particular track and live with it for months, during the writing—my drug of choice, just to get my brain sorted. [...] With Arcadia, the drug was the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and since that play ends with a couple waltzing to music from an offstage party, I wrote the song into the ending and stayed high on that idea till I'd finished. It was inspiring. When, in rehearsals, it was pointed out to me that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" isn't a waltz and that, therefore, my couple would have to waltz to something else, I was astonished, uncomprehending, and resentful.

Sorry, Tom, that you "couldn't get what you want" regarding the ending of Arcadia, though that makes a good ironic twist. (One of the fun things about being a playwright--or perhaps any kind of writer--is putting in-jokes and references to personal favorite songs, etc., in your plays.) I wonder what song the director ended up using--not many rock songs are in 3/4 time!

Still, I have always considered both Arcadia and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" brilliant, brilliant expressions of human creativity. And now, in my mind, they'll always be connected. The ending of Arcadia never fails to move me and this might make it even more poignant.

Evidently, too, "the sartorially elegant Tom modeled himself on Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, only to become a close friend of the rock singer" (citation) and there is a similarity to their facial features as well (big lips)...though I think Tom has definitely aged better, despite being 6 years older!













Sir Mick (photo from i.realone.com) vs. Sir Tom (photo from broadwayworld.com)



But Mick in 1969, singing and hip-swiveling and looking a lot like Stoppard--wow!

Summer Reading: The Frederica Potter Quartet

Two nights ago I finished my other summer reading goal (mentioned here): A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter Quartet. Actually, I read the first book, The Virgin in the Garden, last March, and the others, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman, this summer. I'll probably get several blog postings out of the series: because I enjoyed it so much; because it's so dense with character, incident, allusion, and commentary (and nearly 2000 pages total); and because in my opinion people don't talk enough about it! Earlier this summer The Sheila Variations did a big series of posts about Byatt, including reviews and excerpts of the first three Frederica novels... this is a great resource and made me excited to read more Byatt!

I'll begin by simply describing and discussing the series and its books. Basically, the Quartet looks at England from 1953 to 1970, centering on Frederica Potter (aged 17 when the story begins), her family and friends. I have no idea how autobiographical the series is supposed to be, but there are certainly similarities between Frederica and her creator, A.S. Byatt--they share a birthday (though Frederica is a year older), they are both from Yorkshire, they went to Cambridge when it was rare for a woman to do so, etc. Frederica is not the most likable character--others often perceive her as pushy or irritating or superficial--but I am actually quite fond of her. I feel like I often have "Frederica moments."

In the first book, The Virgin in the Garden, it's 1953, and Elizabeth II is about to be crowned, and up in Yorkshire they are producing a big outdoor play about the life of the first Queen Elizabeth, written by a man named Alexander Wedderburn. Frederica fancies herself madly in love with Alexander (who is probably twice her age) and is thrilled when she gets cast as the young Elizabeth. Much of the novel takes place backstage, and I have to say, Byatt completely gets what theater people are like. Though the characters are British people from a half-century ago, they are totally recognizable to anyone who's hung around actors. For this reason alone--a character like Frederica in a setting like the theater--I loved the book. Meanwhile, Frederica's siblings are also learning about sex and love. Stephanie (calm, pleasant, a few years out of college) falls in love with Daniel Orton, an intense, big-boned clergyman. Marcus (about 15 years old and very awkward--he seems to have Asperger's, though this is never stated) gets into a dangerous relationship with a mentally disturbed teacher named Lucas Simmonds. Their stories did not resonate with me as much as Frederica's did, and I thought Byatt sometimes strained for metaphorical or other significance. Still, even though The Virgin in the Garden seems plotless at first, it's actually based around some compelling narrative questions. Will Stephanie actually marry Daniel? What is Lucas Simmonds doing with Marcus? And, to whom will Frederica lose her virginity?

Maybe the second book's title, Still Life, should have tipped me off that it would have less of a plot. It's the shortest of the four books, but for me, it felt the loosest and least compelling. The other books in the Quartet follow disparate plotlines with increasing urgency, until they all draw closer together and come to a head. Still Life doesn't do that--instead, Byatt-as-narrator breaks in to discuss the philosophy and representation of color, metaphor and language, Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, her own goals in writing this novel, etc. I find this irritating and pretentious--or at least, poorly dramatized. Still, I love all the characters, and the individual steps of their journeys are often well done. Frederica goes to Cambridge and is in her element, surrounded by books, learning, and young men. But life is harder for Stephanie, who struggles with the old work vs. family conundrum. *SPOILERS* In lieu of a really well-built climax, Byatt kills Stephanie off in a freak accident (she's electrocuted by an un-grounded refrigerator--the perfect death for a reluctant housewife). I resented feeling like this sympathetic character was killed to make a point about the status of women, as well as to make Frederica distraught enough to marry her current boyfriend, the wealthy "man's man" Nigel Reiver. Also, Still Life introduces a lot of characters who become important in the next two books, but don't have much of a function in this one (e.g. charismatic minister Gideon Farrar). In the scheme of the Quartet, this novel feels like a placeholder.

The next book, Babel Tower, though, comes roaring out of the gate and doesn't let up. It has the strongest plot, the most at stake, and the fiercest questions animating it. We jump forward in time to the mid-sixties: Frederica now has a 4-year-old son, Leo, and is chafing under her husband's control. In the longest chapter of the Quartet, Nigel becomes physically abusive and Frederica and Leo run off to "Swinging" London. There, Frederica seeks a job, a divorce, and custody of her son--not easy, because this is before the days of no-fault divorce. Meanwhile, a derelict man named Jude Mason has published a book called Babbletower, which gets put on trial for obscenity. Excerpts from Jude's story weave in and out of Byatt's--it's about a utopian community that degenerates into a Sadeian nightmare, and the question is whether its literary merit outweighs its gruesomeness. Personally, I think it's great, and gutsy: a fable about the dangers of unlimited freedom, a kind of warning to the 1960s idealists. It also brings in the big theme of "group behavior," which continues to the end of the series. (It's even present in the earlier novels, though not as obviously. The backstage scenes of Virgin are all about group behavior!)

Anyway, Frederica's divorce trial and Jude's obscenity trial coincide, along with the hippie/mod mid-sixties, resulting in a really big, explosive novel about freedom, censorship, individuality, and society. Another major theme of Babel Tower, and the Quartet, is interconnectedness. Not only does Byatt love symbolic patterns and interdisciplinary allusions, the characters' relationships are also tangled. For instance, Frederica's brother-in-law, Daniel, answers phones for a crisis hotline, which Jude Mason keeps calling, and Daniel's boss and Jude are both published by Frederica's boss...

Frederica takes a lesser role in A Whistling Woman, the complex interrelationships of her friends and acquaintances coming to the fore. In terms of intellectual concerns, this novel pays new attention to the social and natural sciences. Much of it takes place at the University of North Yorkshire, which is touting a multidisciplinary approach and planning a conference on Body and Mind (another theme that runs through the Quartet). Byatt, too, takes a multidisciplinary approach to the late '60s: the university conference and Frederica's pop-intellectual talk show allow her to analyze things from a variety of perspectives. Meanwhile, the themes of group behavior and individual freedom continue from Babel Tower. A group of hippie students is agitating for an "anti-university," and a religious cult is forming nearby. One of my favorite parts of A Whistling Woman involves Brenda Pincher, a sociologist who pretends to be a cult member but is actually there to observe how cults form. Brenda's letters to a colleague get increasingly paranoid and desperate; this, and other events, build up the tension in the same way that Babel Tower did.

As you can see, the books get more complex and harder to summarize as the Quartet goes on, and by the end of it, your head can really spin with all that Byatt has crammed in there. Still, I think my two favorite books--The Virgin in the Garden and Babel Tower--can stand on their own; Virgin because it's the first entry and Babel Tower because it is so different from, and so much better than, the book that preceded it. A Whistling Woman is a good and satisfying conclusion, but I wouldn't recommend it if you haven't at least read Babel Tower first. Still Life is a must if you want to get the most out of the series, and there are some great scenes in it, some good observations, but ultimately it wasn't compelling enough for me. (Byatt has much more to say about the '60s than the '50s.) Still, at least one person thinks it's the best of Byatt's novels, and if it's not explosive like the other three, it--as its title suggests--is quiet and contemplative, and perhaps I'll like it better when I reread it. As I surely will, sometime. It will take much more than one reading to wrestle with all the ideas that Byatt has put into her Quartet.