Books, Arts & Manners: Mourning Becomes Catching

THE etiology of unearned success is neither simple nor uninteresting, and it deserves greater attention than it gets. Consider, for example, The Designated Mourner and its author, Wallace Shawn. A small, chubby fellow with an assertive fringe of hair and an understatedly porcine countenance, Shawn owes his status to a number of extracurricular circumstances.

First, he is the son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, a magazine that anybody who is anybody reads, wants to be published in, or hopes for good reviews from. Rightly or wrongly, appreciation of Wallace-or Wally, as people call him-was perceived as a stepping-stone to that magazine. Yet those in the know also realized that, in rebellion against his father, Wally had become a bohemian and, it seems, self-supporting, which naturally enhanced his moral stature. Then, for his movie Manhattan, Woody Allen needed a sight gag: he had to find an actor unsightlier than himself. When the legendary ex-husband of the Diane Keaton character of whom the Woody character was madly jealous turned out to be Wally Shawn, laughter exploded.

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John Simon

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THE etiology of unearned success is neither simple nor uninteresting, and it deserves greater attention than it gets. Consider, for example, The Designated Mourner and its author, Wallace Shawn. A small, chubby fellow with an assertive fringe of hair and an understatedly porcine countenance, Shawn owes his status to a number of extracurricular circumstances.

First, he is the son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, a magazine that anybody who is anybody reads, wants to be published in, or hopes for good reviews from. Rightly or wrongly, appreciation of Wallace-or Wally, as people call him-was perceived as a stepping-stone to that magazine. Yet those in the know also realized that, in rebellion against his father, Wally had become a bohemian and, it seems, self-supporting, which naturally enhanced his moral stature. Then, for his movie Manhattan, Woody Allen needed a sight gag: he had to find an actor unsightlier than himself. When the legendary ex-husband of the Diane Keaton character of whom the Woody character was madly jealous turned out to be Wally Shawn, laughter exploded.