Books, Arts & Manners: Gray Matter

IN 1984, the wispy monologist Spalding Gray landed a small part in The Killing Fields, the Roland Joffe film that can still occasionally be seen on Ted Turner’s Khmer Rouge Cable Channel. Over the next couple of years, Gray repackaged his movie-making experiences into a monologue, which became the entertaining 1987 film Swimming to Cambodia. Gray spent the next four years writing a totally unreadable, 1,900-page novel, Impossible Vacation, which Knopf has since trimmed down to a readable but totally unnecessary novel of the same name (228 pp., $22). Simultaneously, Gray has repackaged the experiences he had while writing his unreadable novel into an entertaining film called Monster in a Box. This would seem to suggest that four or five years down the road, he will repackage his experiences while composing an unlistenable opera or choreographing an unwatchable ballet into an entertaining film called Think Tank of the Gods or Slouching toward Martha’s Vineyard. This guy has a great, great job.

As a monologist, Gray is the third and, some might say, the brightest star in a very tiny constellation, which includes Eric Bogosian and Garrison Keillor. (Monologists, for those unfamiliar with the art form, are stand-up comics who have read R. D. Laing.) Unlike the angry not-so-young-man Bogosian or the gnomish rustic Keillor, Gray is a standard-issue neurotic, of a type New Yorkers will easily recognize, since everyone in New York either is or has lived next door to Spalding Gray. With his flowing mane of unstylish grey hair and his tidy lumberjack shirts (I didn’t know Ralph Lauren made Great Northern Woodsmen Shirts in extra-extra-small), Gray has been described as a WASP Woody Allen. This description is appropriate, in that Gray, like Allen, is dissatisfied with being a talented comic; he also feels a need to display his brooding, serious side, even if this means tying both his hands behind his back, artistically speaking, by writing material that isn’t funny. In this sense, Impossible Vacation is Spalding Gray’s Interiors. Only not as awful.

JQ

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Joe Queenan

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IN 1984, the wispy monologist Spalding Gray landed a small part in The Killing Fields, the Roland Joffe film that can still occasionally be seen on Ted Turner’s Khmer Rouge Cable Channel. Over the next couple of years, Gray repackaged his movie-making experiences into a monologue, which became the entertaining 1987 film Swimming to Cambodia. Gray spent the next four years writing a totally unreadable, 1,900-page novel, Impossible Vacation, which Knopf has since trimmed down to a readable but totally unnecessary novel of the same name (228 pp., $22). Simultaneously, Gray has repackaged the experiences he had while writing his unreadable novel into an entertaining film called Monster in a Box. This would seem to suggest that four or five years down the road, he will repackage his experiences while composing an unlistenable opera or choreographing an unwatchable ballet into an entertaining film called Think Tank of the Gods or Slouching toward Martha’s Vineyard. This guy has a great, great job.

As a monologist, Gray is the third and, some might say, the brightest star in a very tiny constellation, which includes Eric Bogosian and Garrison Keillor. (Monologists, for those unfamiliar with the art form, are stand-up comics who have read R. D. Laing.) Unlike the angry not-so-young-man Bogosian or the gnomish rustic Keillor, Gray is a standard-issue neurotic, of a type New Yorkers will easily recognize, since everyone in New York either is or has lived next door to Spalding Gray. With his flowing mane of unstylish grey hair and his tidy lumberjack shirts (I didn’t know Ralph Lauren made Great Northern Woodsmen Shirts in extra-extra-small), Gray has been described as a WASP Woody Allen. This description is appropriate, in that Gray, like Allen, is dissatisfied with being a talented comic; he also feels a need to display his brooding, serious side, even if this means tying both his hands behind his back, artistically speaking, by writing material that isn’t funny. In this sense, Impossible Vacation is Spalding Gray’s Interiors. Only not as awful.