Glover in a 2002 rehearsal for 'The Exonerated.' (Courtesy Tannen Maury/AFP/Getty Images)

The funny thing about eureka moments is the way they sneak up on us unawares and radically rearrange our lives. The front-runners—maybe the only-runners—in the meager field of cell-block confessionals exist because of such moments.

On Sept. 15, after some time off, the Culture Project, under the leadership of founder and artistic director Allan Buchman, reclaims its theater at 49 Bleecker with a 10th anniversary edition of its most acclaimed presentation, The Exonerated, a harrowing docudrama based on court records and talks with six unjustly incarcerated, finally freed individuals.

The interviews were conducted by a couple of in-love, at-liberty actors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, and the script they assembled—directed by Bob Balaban—will be performed by a rotating cast of Stockard Channing, Brian Dennehy, Delroy Lindo and Chris Sarandon, with a core group of six in support. Waiting in the wings to take over the leads are other name-brand actors like Brooke Shields and Lyle Lovett.

As it happens, it was also ten years ago that The Fortune Academy opened at West 140th Street. A home for men and women just out of prison, it’s a hulking, Gothic structure that lives up to its nickname, “The Castle.” Every Thursday night, at a community meeting there, residents talk about their struggles to adjust to freedom. A regular at these meetings was David Rothenberg, the Broadway publicist who produced Fortune and Men’s Eyes and founded The Fortune Society, which runs the Academy. Mr. Rothenberg couldn’t help but notice that the tales pouring out of “The Castle” were far more dramatic than the plays he was seeing at the time. It was not until “the five stools and the women”—The Vagina Monologues—that he realized how it could be done. Eureka! The Castle.

The Exonerated and The Castle would seem to be two very different schools of thought—testimonies of the wrongly imprisoned vs. testimonies of the formerly imprisoned—but the link that connects them and that grabbed the public’s attention was their shared hope for change.

For Mr. Jensen and Ms. Blank, the eureka moment occurred early in 2000, a few weeks into their romance, when she invited him to a death-penalty conference. Already smitten, Mr. Jensen said he “would have said yes to anything. If she had suggested I go get knee surgery, I’d have gone out and had done it—or broken my knees so that I’d need knee surgery.”

Held at Columbia University, the conference was a series of workshops on specific cases, and the one that held particular significance for the now-married couple concerned The Death Row Ten, a group of mostly African-American men whose confessions had been tortured out of them. “There was no evidence against most of these men, except for their quote-unquote confessions,” said Mr. Jensen. “The torture was the kind of stuff they did in Vietnam—full blows to the back of the head and electrical devices on genitals—anything that didn’t leave a mark.” The police commander responsible for these tactics was subsequently found out, fired and charged, but a half-dozen accused still remained on Death Row.

“We heard a lecture on the case, saw some documentary footage—all very disturbing but kind of on an intellectual level,” recalled Ms. Blank. That mood shifted sharply when workshop organizers piped in one of the imprisoned’s voices, via cell phone from Chicago. “The call only lasted a few minutes before it was cut off by authorities, and he wasn’t saying much more than he missed his family and wanted to come home, but by the end, people in the room were crying. There was something so powerful about the spoken word—the truth of it, the immediacy of it. It was enormously moving on a human, personal level.

“We actors immediately had the idea of creating a documentary play—to travel around the country and interview Death Row inmates and make a play from the transcripts,” said Ms. Blank. And since Culture Project often addressed human rights issues by spotlighting injustices, she found an easy mark in Mr. Buchman in May of 2000. “He said, ‘Great. You can have my theatre for free for three nights in the fall if you get a reading up before the election. Here’s $1,000. Go.’ Allan’s greatest gift was the deadline.” The couple zeroed in on the top 20 of their 40 phone interviews, rented a car, put the dog in the back seat and ventured forth to meet the incarcerated men in person.

They recorded interviews in June and July, workshopped the text with actors and came up with a first draft by August. While all this was going on, Ms. Blank said, “We were calling literally everybody we knew and asking for help. We called journalist friends and asked them how to do an interview. We called playwright friends and asked them how to write a play. We called lawyer friends and human-rights friends and folks who worked in the nonprofit world to ask them how to raise money. Aside from that first $1,000, we were raising money for our travel expenses ourselves. We were totally broke.

“One of the people we called was Bob Balaban, who had directed Erik, and we asked him if he’d consider directing the reading. He said, ‘Send me what you have,’ which was 150 pages of interview transcriptions, but he called us right back and said, ‘Yes, absolutely—and do you mind if I show this to some friends?’” Two weeks later, he told them Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon would do the first reading, and that brought other high-caliber actors on board. Eventually, the couple reduced the stories to six, added material from court transcripts and police reports and molded the play into its final form.

It had a two-year run in New York and has been performed at regional theaters, colleges—even high schools. “It’s gone on so long, and gotten the word out so well, we’ve started calling it The Exon—and on and on—erated,” beamed Mr. Jensen.

Recently the couple started picking up the pieces of their acting careers. Mr. Jensen just finished a pilot with Shaun Cassidy and director Thommy Schlamme, and, starting Sept. 28, Ms. Blank can be found Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBS’s Made in Jersey.

Atria published their book, Living Justice: Love, Freedom and the Making of The Exonerated, in 2005, as the Balaban-directed movie aired on CourtTV with Ms. Sarandon, Mr. Dennehy, Aidan Quinn and Danny Glover.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rothenberg has also diligently recorded his time with bars and stars—Fortune in My Eyes: A Memoir of Broadway Glamour, Social Justice, and Political Passion—to be released Oct. 9 by Applause Books. The book begins one universe removed from the glitzy neighborhood where he hung with Liz & Dick & Marlene & Maurice—in Attica during the 1971 riots, when he was part of a team of observers, along with Minister Louis Farrakhan, The New York Times’ Tom Wicker and civil rights lawyer William Kunstler. He was introduced to the roiling inmates as “founder of The Fortune Society and producer of the prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes.”

That production began half a century ago, during a casual conversation with Nathan Cohen, drama critic of The Toronto Star. “He told me he’d just seen a reading of an extraordinary play that would never play Canada,” Mr. Rothenberg remembered. “He said it needed a New York imprimatur. I said, ‘Nathan, you haven’t liked anything since Potemkin. If you liked it, I gotta read it.’

“Well, I was chilled by the play. I’d seen prison movies. They were either rioting or escaping. They weren’t raping. This was about a kid who comes in and gets raped the first night, and, when I met John Herbert, I learned that indeed it was his story, and he had, in fact, been gang-raped. He told me he had been in a state of rage for 20 years. He was 36 when he wrote the play and 20 when it happened. Theater was his cathartic release. I gave it to several producers, and they all said, ‘Well, it’s a thrilling piece of theater, but who’s going to come?’ So I decided to produce it myself.”

And he did—at the Actors’ Playhouse, for 13 months in the late ’60s—directed by Mitchell Nestor, starring Victor Arnold, Robert Christian, Terry Kiser and Bill Moor.

The Fortune Society was born after ex-cons with stories to tell started populating the talkbacks after performances. Sixteen people gave two dollars cash for expenses, and a bank account was started with $32. Fortune, which aids prisoners’ reentry into society, now has a staff of over 190. Mr. Rothenberg served for 18 years as its first executive director.

In 1985, he ran for City Council; he didn’t win but was elected State Committeeman for the Democratic Party in 1986. “I realized, by then, that I had done all I could do at Fortune—that I was a grass-roots person, and it needed more sophistication,” said Mr. Rothenberg, who opted for a graceful exit and returned to theater publicity, where his old boss, producer Alexander Cohen, and Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding kept him busy.

When The Castle started looking like a viable property, he was pulled to the other side of the footlights to direct and dramatically shape the life stories of the cast. Produced by Chase Mishkin and Eric Krebs, The Castle put in a year Off-Broadway at New World Stages in 2008 and has been pelted with requests from colleges, churches and prisons ever since. “We’ll be in Sing Sing before 400 inmates on the 26th, back at The Castle on the 30th, at the Jewish Community Center at 76th and Amsterdam on Oct. 11, and in November at Baruch College and Rutgers. We have about 50 dates a year. I thought it’d fade away, but you can’t kill it with a stick.

“The Exonerated broke my heart when I saw it—they’re all innocent,” Mr. Rothenberg said. “Our cast isn’t. They’re guilty, but the crime is what they did—it’s not who they are. Every time somebody does a story, they want to know what they did, as if that told them who they are. As one guy says, ‘They should hear about all the things I got away with!’”

editorial@observer.com

Paul, left, and Pasek.

The morning after their official arrival on the New York theater scene—true to the showbiz edict that George Abbott passed down to Harold Prince—Benj Pasek and Justin Paul scheduled a meeting for a new show. This is the established, industry-wide Rx for warding off any hangovers caused by booze or bad reviews, and these two newbie songwriters, both 27, happily hark back to old rules.

You can’t say they never sang for their fathers—or, for that matter, for their grandfathers. Dogfight, their Off Broadway dual-debut, playing till Aug. 19 at Second Stage, is set in the early ’60s. (“It was a tough time for us,” muttered Mr. Pasek, dropping his voice to a lower register as if that masked the fact that he was born in 1985.) Their Broadwaybows come exactly three months later (Nov. 19 to Dec. 30) at the Lunt-Fontanne with A Christmas Story, The Musical!, which jumps back 20 more years to a mid-’40s Yuletide.

Whether Pasek & Paul become this millennium’s Lerner & Loewe remains to be seen, but they are on the right track and coming at a respectable speed out of the University of Michigan’s theater department, old school ties flapping in the wind.

“We developed an appreciation for all those classic musicals and began to really analyze them and try to figure out what made them so great,” Mr. Paul explained. “Not that we write in their style necessarily, but we understand their craft.”

They went there performers and came out songwriters—primarily because both have two left feet, making dance class an embarrassment. Songwriting became their preferred form of expression, an outlet to relay what they were going through while edging toward maturity, and a song cycle emerged called Edges.

The show surfaced in 2005, the year of Facebook and YouTube, and quickly developed an online life, one that led, within a year, to productions at 12 other colleges. A vocation had found them, and, as Edges grew, they shopped around for properties.

Enter Peter Duchan, a friend of Mr. Paul’s from his Westport Elementary days. They placed their order with him—something youthful, with energy, that felt American—and he trolled Netflix until he finally found a film where all those elements aligned.

The easy-to-overlook Dogfight, released in 1991, is a first-love story, premised on a mean-spirited prank: some young Marines, bound for Vietnam, throw a party their last night in San Francisco, and the jarhead with the ugliest date wins the collective pot.

The most sensitive of the lot, Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix) sets his sights on plain-jane waitress Rose (Lili Taylor), who, unfortunately, cleans up so well he starts feeling guilty, and falls in love. Sections of the plot that follows are whopping wounds of vulnerability that are negotiated gingerly, helped out a lot by pockets of unexpected humor. It’s a sweet heart-twister.

The film never got far beyond the front row of admiring critics. Director Nancy Savoca, who recently returned to filmmaking after a 12-year absence with the Mira Sorvino-Tammy Blanchard Union Square, was their darling back then, but their rave reviews didn’t help. It was grossly (or, more to the point, grosslessly) underattended.

Which is a plus for Mr. Paul. “A little gem very few people know about—that’s very freeing, actually. It meant we could change the story without having people wait for The Line that they remember from the movie. It was just what we were looking for.”

With Mr. Duchan aboard as book writer (doing a commendably close approximation of Bob Comfort’s original screenplay), they pursued the musical rights as a team and, in time, acquired them from Warner Bros. “We worked on it for three and a half years,” Mr. Pasek said. “For a musical, that’s actually less time than others take.”

Soon enough, their music reached the ears of director Joe Mantello. “I heard three songs from the show years ago, and, on the basis of that, I met Justin and Benj,” he recalled. “We went and had lunch, and I just said, ‘I think you guys are great, and somewhere down the line, if we can find something to do together, I’d love that.’”

Dogfight, it turned out, was down the line, and the director, a two-time Tony winner (Assassins, Take Me Out), didn’t hesitate, shepherding the project with a knowing hand. “It has been so exciting to collaborate with three people who are at the very beginning of their careers. Their enthusiasm, their optimism—infectious!”

The feeling was mutual. “It was a master’s class in grad school every single day,” in Mr. Pasek’s view. “Joe really took it and shaped it and molded it. Truly, it was an amazing learning experience, a joyful collaboration. We’re so grateful for it.”

Messrs. Pasek and Paul aren’t trying to find their own voices in their work. They are trying to find character, period, situation, the right emotion needed for the moment. A show score with melody, maturity, variety and surprise—one that impresses on first hearing and improves on the second—is so rare in musical theater these days that almost every critic caught it on the first bounce and duly noted it.

“The tunes that the songwriters have penned for character not only bring to mind the anthems of the era, but they also zing with the sounds of contemporary musical theater,” wrote Andy Propst in The Huffington Post. And Ben Brantley ended his Times review with a nice bouquet to “First Date/Last Night,” “a winning low-key date song for the couple, finding melodic grace in romantic awkwardness.”

The only critical cleating the score got came from the New York Post’s deaf-as-a-post Elisabeth Vincentelli, who found it “terminally dull” and “irritatingly polite.” Still missing the point: “That guys in their 20s could write such fuddy-duddy songs is baffling. And they keep winning fancy fellowships—only in musical theater, folks!” (Could it be that the people who voted the 2011 Richard Rodgers Studio Production Award to Dogfight—Stephen Sondheim, Jeanine Tesori, David Ives, John Guare, Lynn Ahrens, Sheldon Harnick, John Weidman and Richard Maltby Jr.—know what they’re talking about and recognize that these 20-somethings do, too? Just asking, Elis . . .)

Framed as a flashback, Dogfight begins with a soldier-boy limping back from the war, returning to the scene of his betrayal. “Some Kinda Time” starts out on a folk-flavored guitar, pulling the past gently into focus, and then erupts into a boys-will-be-boisterous shore leave number like On the Town’s “New York, New York” opener.

Essentially, there are four major characters—the three jokester jugheads played by Carrie’s Derek Klena, Lysistrata Jones’ Josh Segarra and Glory Days’ Nick Blaemire, and the frumpy wallflower who blossoms from Klena’s invite, Godspell’s Lindsay Mendez—but these four are surrounded by a milling multitude, mostly fielded by three very funny and very skilled utility players: Annaleigh Ashford, Dierdre Friel and James Moye. Everybody in the show seems to have a song to sing.

Mr. Moye, who juggles six characters, from a drill sergeant to a transvestite, scores double as a hip-swiveling lounge singer: “Benj and Justin have written two songs that I sing in a very early-’60s style,” he said. “One of ’em feels Chubby Checkerish, and the ballad definitely feels Andy Williams. It’s fun stuff to get a chance to sing. These guys are obviously super-talented, and they have such a bright future.”

Michael Starobin, who won a Tony for orchestrating Assassins, puts the songs forth to their best advantage, in particular underlining the Sondheim echoes of the title tune. A rant against male pack mentality, it is ferociously delivered by our heroine, played by Ms. Mendez, and Ms. Ashford’s tough tart.

The favorite song of the two leads (and of the two men who wrote it) is also Mr. Brantley’s pick: the lovely, lilting “First Date/Last Night.” Said Ms. Mendez, “It’s unbelievable to be able to debut a score of this caliber. Every song is so unique and special and fits the moment so perfectly. It’s a dream to get to sing their stuff.”

There are 16 songs in Dogfight, and A Christmas Story will go into rehearsal for Broadway with 17, but that may change, since Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul plan rewrites.

The show was already off and running when the producers (among them, Peter Billingsley, who played the B.B.  gun-obsessed little Ralphie in the original 1983 film) decided to switch scores in mid-tour. Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul were among those who were invited to come in to audition, and one of the things they came up with is now the show’s exuberant curtain-raiser, “Counting Down to Christmas.”

“It was a perfect framing device,” recalled John Bolton, who has put in a couple of years on the road playing the hapless head of the household. “The score has a great deal of variety. They wrote ’40s idiom, radio idiom, Christmas idiom, a burlesque idiom for the dad’s big leg-lamp number called ‘A Major Award,’ the cowboy idiom for Ralphie’s fantasy number, ‘Red Ryder,’ the little boy’s ‘I Want’ number, which comes right at the top of the show and is a showstopping song for a powerhouse kid.

“They write for characters just so beautifully. The kids sound like kids. The mom sounds like a mom. The dad sounds like the dad. The teacher sounds like the teacher. They write so smartly and, I think, thrillingly for character—with great regard for how much muscle is needed for a particular moment in the show. I genuinely believe this score that they’ve written is not just a serviceable score for a contemporary holiday show, but I believe it to be a classic American score.”

So one doesn’t think they’re always running off to the movies to get musical ideas, Mr. Pasek pointed out that A Christmas Story wasn’t their idea, that they were brought aboard by the producers of the show. “We’re trying to develop our own original ideas as well and strike a good balance of doing original work and also adaptations.”

In 2010 they did a musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1961 children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, and it premiered at Goodspeed’s Norma Terris in a developmental production that was directed by Graciela Daniele and choreographed by Pilobolus.

Then there’s that new show. “We’re beginning our first full book musical that’s an original with a playwright named Steven Levenson, who wrote The Language of Trees and The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin,” said Mr. Pasek. “He’s around our own age, too, so we’re very excited to be collaborating with him.”

Ah, youth—when everything is possible. Is there a song in that, guys?

editorial@observer.com

(Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

Last night, moviegoers took a break from big-budget popcorn flicks for 60th-anniversary screenings of Singin’ in the Rain all around town that were presented by Turner Classic Movies and hosted by NCM Fathom Events. The Observer attended a screening in Union Square, where longtime fans, old and young, arrived early with their children and uninitiated friends to get good seats.

“This one of my favorite movies from childhood,” said one patron who arrived an hour early, “but growing up in the ‘90s, I never got to see it on the big screen.” She and the people sitting near her didn’t have to be bored waiting; pre-show trivia flashed across the screen (did you know they made it rain milk and water for the big “Singin’ in the Rain” number so it would show up on camera?)

Before the feature presentation, NCM showed a 15-minute introduction and a taping from this spring’s TCM Classic Film Festival. TCM’s Robert Osborne had spoken with Debbie Reynolds in front of a live audience at the festival. At 80 years old, Ms. Reynolds is just as cute as when she was an 18-year-old leading lady—she is what behind-the-scenes features on  special-edition DVDs are made of. She remembered being terrified of dancing next to Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor when she had no formal dance training herself.

Her interview was spliced with comments from O’Connor, Cyd Charisse, and Patricia Ward Kelly, Kelly’s widow (he died in 1996). One thing all the stars agreed on was the joy—and challenge—of going toe-to-toe with Gene Kelly. “I had blood in my shoes after filming that number,” said Ms. Reynolds of “Good Morning.” They also had plenty to say about Kelly’s tough choreography and strict direction. It’s no surprise they found it tough—he had a vision. Ward Kelly remembered, “He really wanted to change the way dance looked on screen.”

Once the interviews ended, the audience really settled in and got caught up in the Technicolor treat, clapping after the biggest numbers like O’Connor’s slapstick-y “Make ‘Em Laugh,” “Good Morning” and, of course, “Singin’ in the Rain.” We left the theatre floating on air, having forgotten the noise of the city and The Amazing Spider-Man.

Wade McCollum, Shelley Thomas, Lindsay Nicole Chambers, Claire Neumann and Brandon Ezpinoza in 'Triassic Parq: The Musical.'

Several years ago, when Marshall Pailet was an undergrad at Yale studying intellectual history, an acquaintance planted it in his head that Jurassic Park would make a great ballet. When he graduated, in 2009, the idea of dancing dinosaurs was still with him. Today he is more than happy to admit that Triassic Parq: The Musical, which opened June 27 at the SoHo Playhouse, “started with a stupid idea.”

The show isn’t a ballet, but it honors the film with song and dance, and it’s narrated by Morgan Freeman (well, sort of). Mr. Pailet debuted Triassic Parq at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2010. The show won the Best Musical award that year, but it was still rough around the edges. “What worked really well about the Fringe festival production,” Mr. Pailet said during a recent interview, “is the idea was there, and the humor was really random. We really liked that, but the structure of the plot was also really random and we didn’t have a protagonist and there was no arc to the show.” Along with coauthors Bryce Norbitz and Steve Wargo, he set out to clean it up.

What’s left is the story of the Velociraptor of Innocence, a girly-girl of a dinosaur—played in the present production by Alex Wyse, a man—who only wants to protect her community. The dinosaurs are in one of their daily worship services with dino-pastor the Velociraptor of Faith (played by Wade Collum, who insists you call him Mama), when their world is shattered. T-Rex 2 mysteriously develops a penis. The Velociraptor of Innocence sets out on a slightly odd but understandable quest: how do I get rid of my friend’s penis so she doesn’t have to leave the tribe? That turns into exploration of gender identity, sexuality, faith—and the elusive nature of Morgan Freeman.

Maybe the strangest thing about Triassic Parq, which got a generally upbeat review last week in The Times (“... overproduced and scattershot and a little bit desperate. It is also more than a little bit fun”), is that its producers and actors don’t think it’s all that strange. “When you go ‘Oh, I’m doing a show,’ you’d be shocked by the number of people who think, ‘Another young person just out of college putting out a show, oh great. This is gonna be yawn-o-rama,’” said Lee Seymour. A close friend of Mr. Pailet’s from Yale and one-third of the production company Flying Squirrel, he is one of Triassic Parq’s producers and the actor who plays Morgan Freeman. “And then you say, ‘no, actually, it’s Jurassic Park told from the point of view of the dinosaurs narrated by Morgan Freeman,’ and immediately they do a double take. Those three things—dinosaurs, Jurassic Park and Morgan Freeman—really do kind of get people’s interest.”

What gets people’s interest when they walk into the theater is a pre-show “dinosaur jungle soundscape,” as Mr. Pailet calls it. “It makes people think they’re about to see bad theme park entertainment,” he said. “We like them to not know what’s coming, because then it’s that much more fun when they key into what story we’re telling.”

That surprise factor is what got Amas Musical Theatre onboard as a producing partner. “One of the things I think is really clever about the show is that it’s constantly surprising,” said Amas producing artistic director Donna Trinkoff. “There’s always something happening that I didn’t see coming.” Amas has been telling the stories of people across a wide selection of cultures—advancing the voices of marginalized groups—for more than 40 years through shows like Wanda’s World and Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues, and Ms. Trinkoff doesn’t think dancing dinos are necessarily at odds with the company’s goals. “I guess in some ways this comedy is a little different than what we’ve done in the recent past but it’s not outside our ken.” Amas, she said, tends to stick to more family-friendly fare but Triassic Parq was worth the change. “The humor is so spot on and, in spite of what seems like total entertainment, it has a real message.” On seeing its first staged reading, she said she was “intrigued by the gender identity aspect of the show.” Mr. Pailet, who started his project as a fanboy love letter to the film, agrees it’s bigger than dinosaurs. “Pretty quickly after we started writing, I think we realized it was turning into something else,” he said. “The goal of this production is to tell a very human story about identity crisis through the very goofy and wacky lens of these actors playing dinosaurs.” T-Rex 2 has to deal with the physical and emotional changes her body puts her through, but all the members of the tribe start trying to figure out who they are.

It’s all a bit baroque, but suffice to say that T-Rex 2 and Velociraptor of Innocence’s identity crises are also crises of faith. Mama preaches the gospel of the almighty Lab, a belief system in which the scientists are agents of Lab, the power that blesses the dinosaurs with a fresh goat each morning. After Innocence’s quest leads her to learn about where baby raptors come from, she starts doubting both Mama and the holy Lab. While this secondary theme leaves room for hilarious gender-bending sex scenes, the issues of faith resonate with Mr. Pailet, who was raised Jewish and, by his own account, “spent a lot of time in college studying many different faiths and trying to figure out what it was that attracted me and also repelled me.” For Ms. Trinkoff, faith is a big selling point of the show, one of the things that serves to humanize the ancient beasts. “They’re like a primitive human tribe that’s trying to make sense of a universe that’s presented in a very incomprehensible manner. What is religion? How do we survive? Where is the spirituality in our lives? How do we find that?”

So, you are probably wondering, where does Morgan Freeman come into all this? Mr. Seymour, the actor who does the “Morgan Freeman” narration, spent a year studying Shakespeare in London and finds his training is coming in handy. “Morgan Freeman is the Shakespearean archetype of the guy at the opening of Henry V who sets the stage and then kind of brings the audience into the world of the show.” The world of this show may be one of braided rubber penises but it’s also one that takes drama seriously. “This is silly but I before I go on stage I always recite the entire ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy as Morgan Freeman to get in the right mindset of seriousness and truth.”

Singing dinosaurs may not have the answers to the Big Questions—that would be a tall order for humans in 90 minutes—but they might be able to remind us to laugh while we try to figure it all out.

editorial@observer.com

(Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his 2008 essay “The Chinese Puffin,” reprinted in his second essay collection, Farther Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26.00), Jonathan Franzen contemplates the apparently limitless carpet of lights unfurling from the center of Shanghai, and asks, “Does anybody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” In a rare moment in these essays, he answers “yes,” but is unwilling to drag us there. In fact, steering clear of the really deep shit—certain kinds of hard truths—is Mr. Franzen’s m.o. throughout this collection.

Make no mistake, Mr. Franzen’s writing is nothing short of immaculate—as meticulously constructed as it is sterile. Throughout the 21 pieces gathered here, the bulk of which first appeared in The New Yorker, he demonstrates that as a prose stylist, he bears comparison to the most painstaking of entomologists, carefully pinning the wings of a butterfly to best reveal its beauty in a certain light and at a very specific angle. What results is the brilliant, luminous, platonic ideal of the subject; only when removed from its hermetically sealed environment does it reveals it flaws.

In a word, Mr. Franzen’s methodical prose—with certain exceptions, such as “Hornets,” his short reflection on delinquency—can ring a bit lifeless. Still, his new collection takes the reader on a closely guided tour of his private concerns, most of which, it must be said, are fascinating: the miscorrelation between merit and fame, the breakdown of a marriage, birds, the waning relevance of the novel in popular culture. Perhaps not surprisingly for a novelist, among his abiding concerns are other novelists. At one point, he performs an armchair analysis of recent “literary minded” writers by comparing the number of Amazon reviews of their work with those of the canonical 20th-century luminaries: Woolf, Pynchon and Joyce.

In the several actual book reviews sprinkled throughout the collection, Mr. Franzen tends to focus on, and champion, somewhat obscure writers—Christina Stead, James Purdy, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö—rather than his fellow best-sellers. Sometimes his cheerleading can be a bit grating, and almost arrogant (“Read Munro! Read Munro!”). Otherwise, in pieces like the lecture “On Autobiographical Fiction,” the short tutorial “Comma-Then” and “The End of the Binge,” he reflects on his own writing process.

Along the way, he offers some snappy aphorisms, such as “avowing sincerity is more or less diagnostic of insincerity.” More often than not, however, such witticisms are diluted by length of his essays; this is especially true of the meandering and ultimately unsatisfying “The Chinese Puffin,” an exploration of who really makes products that bear the label “made in China.” It is in pieces like this that Mr. Franzen’s favored approach—part personal essay and part journalism—comes up short.

Better by far is the extended, purely personal reflection in the title essay. “Farther Away” follows Mr. Franzen, an avid birdwatcher, to the small South American island of Masafuera, where he travels in pursuit not only of a rare bird, but also of solitude. Against the backdrop of this exotic setting, he meanders through a number of interconnected topics: conservation, the evolution of the novel, the loneliness of adult life and in particular his mourning of his onetime literary rival and close friend, David Foster Wallace. His relationship with Wallace is a central preoccupation of the new collection; in addition to the passages in “Farther Away,” he has also included the eulogy he delivered after Wallace’s suicide in 2008. The three-year gap between the two ruminations allows for the familiar sentiments to fill out, age and settle into a deeper color. The complex portrait of Wallace that emerges penetrates the clichés of tortured artist or self-alienating savant that appeared in other writings on him in the wake of his death.

A comparison of the two men as nonfiction writers is instructive: Wallace, a novelist, will likely be remembered as a peerless essayist; Mr. Franzen, also a novelist, so far seems likely to be remembered as a novelist. A joy of Mr. Franzen’s novels, particularly evident in 2010’s Freedom, is his ability to create a vast landscape replete with fully rendered characters and absorbing subplots that could each sustain an entire novel. In his essays, Mr. Franzen’s observations can seem picayune, even curmudgeonly. In “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” for instance, he lambasts the often heard “I love you” spoken on cell phones as the “sudden, mysterious, disastrous sentimentalization of American public discourse.”

The essay on Frank Widekinde’s Spring Awakening, sensibly titled “Authentic but Horrible,” balances nuanced literary criticism with accessibility. It was originally published in 2007 as the forward to Mr. Franzen’s translation of the play, and in it he acknowledges the best of previous translations as “less inadequate”; this act of pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes is unappreciated, even if Mr. Franzen produced his translation far before the 2006 revival of the play that prompted his new criticism.

But for the most part in his essays, Mr. Franzen rewards the reader with extended meditations on common phenomena we might otherwise consider unremarkable. His irritating one-man crusade to include the description “late-model” in the American vernacular aside, the observations Mr. Franzen makes regarding subjects like cell phone etiquette, the ever-evolving face of modern love and technology are trenchant.

With Farther Away, Mr. Franzen demonstrates his ability to dissect the kinds of quotidian concerns that so often evade scrutiny. He gets into the trenches: What do our personal interactions with strangers say about the economics of time? Will the “like” feature on Facebook prefigure the end of “love” as a viable emotion? It may be eight years before he releases his next shimmering novel; in the meantime Mr. Franzen seems intent on keeping the conversation going. Farther Away at least achieves that.

editorial@observer.com

'Arcadia.' (Courtesy Voice)

Three-year-old Beckett Kallman has just figured out that his mother, Lauren Groff, writes books for a living.

“It’s a very strange feeling for him,” Ms. Groff said, in a telephone interview from her home in Gainesville, Fla. “When I put him to bed, he asks, ‘Can I read one of your books?’ And I say, ‘Not yet.’”

Undoubtedly, it will be even stranger for Beckett when he discovers that his mother’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice, 304 pages, $25.99), the story of a boy growing up in a Utopian commune, is dedicated to him. And perhaps even stranger when he learns that the little boy in question was inspired by his birth.

“The story grew as my son grew,” Ms. Groff said. “The main character has a lot of Beckett’s characteristics—I mean, they are not the same character. But it was an attempt to see the world through a boy’s eyes.”

Ms. Groff’s previous books, which include her debut novel, 2008’s The Monsters of Templeton and her short story collection, 2009’s Delicate Edible Birds, are told from a decidedly female point of view—which is not to say they are chick lit. Her heroines are feisty misfits more likely to be interested in history or sports than shopping and romance. She is sometimes compared to her former mentor and teacher, Lorrie Moore, but unlike Ms. Moore’s darkly realistic stories, Ms. Groff’s often have a hint of the fantastic. Fittingly, one of her earliest champions was Stephen King, who praised The Monsters of Templeton in an Entertainment Weekly column, describing it as a novel “full of magic, mystery, and monsters” and even comparing it to the Harry Potter series.

“I got lucky,” Ms. Groff said of the King endorsement, and of the events leading up to it. “Well, I worked hard, too,” she conceded. “But when I sold Monsters it really blew the top of the skull off. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was going to have an audience.”

Monsters went on to become the rare literary novel that is both a critical and commercial success, but in the years leading up to its publication Ms. Groff faced so much rejection that she was wary of even describing herself as a writer. As an undergraduate, she told friends she planned to become a pediatrician, even as she took few science courses—and wrote short stories in her spare time. Upon graduation, she began to write what she now describes as “training novels,” taking various dead-end jobs to support her scribbling habit. But that lifestyle eventually grew wearying, and she enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Ms. Moore, her idol, taught.

The pressure of submitting to Ms. Moore, combined with the harsh Wisconsin winters, which kept her indoors, drove Ms. Groff to write “a lot a lot a lot.”

“It was a pivotal moment in my life,” she said.

“I became Lauren’s thesis adviser, but she really wasn’t in need of one,” Ms. Moore told The Observer, via email. “If I tried to do anything it may have been to attempt to slow her down—she was a phenomenon of energy and inspired productivity. Luckily for the world, she didn’t listen to me.”

While in graduate school, Ms. Groff published two short stories, one of them to great acclaim in The Atlantic. “L. Debard and Aliette” is based loosely on the legend of Abelard and Heloise, as well as the real-life story of Ethelda Bleibtrey, a polio survivor who became an Olympic swimmer; its success becomes all the more remarkable when you consider that it was pulled from the slush pile. To the literary world, Ms. Groff seemed to come out of nowhere, and she was soon inundated with requests from agents, wanting to know if she had a novel. She did; while in graduate school, she had been secretly working on the manuscript that would become The Monsters of Templeton.

She ended up signing with Bill Clegg, who impressed her by flying all the way to Kentucky, where she was enjoying a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Louisville.

Mr. Clegg, who at the time was newly recovered from his now-famous stint as a drug addict, was aware that he needed to make a grand gesture to win Ms. Groff’s approval.

“I had just returned to agenting and knew I was likely not anyone’s first choice and couldn’t bear the idea of her working with someone else,” he told The Observer. “So I got on a plane.”

The Monsters of Templeton, a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of a young woman trying to discover her true parentage, takes place in Templeton, a town loosely based on Ms. Groff’s own hometown of Cooperstown, N.Y. Drawing on Cooperstown’s history, as well as the works of author James Fenimore Cooper, Monsters traces a family’s history across eight generations and incorporates a variety of  fictional historical documents including letters, photographs, and family trees. Although some critics found the book overstuffed, almost all admitted that Ms. Groff had the chops to get away with it. As this paper put it, “If she wants bells and whistles, so be it.”

Mr. Clegg compared Monsters to “L. Debard and Aliette” in its layering of fact, fiction and myth. “Both were so spooky in their ability to occupy the perspectives of a vast range of characters. And both were un-put-downable, mysterious, mesmerizing.”

In retrospect, 33-year-old Ms. Groff sees her debut as the product of her ambitious—and uneasy—20s.

“I just realized, five years later, that at its heart, Monsters is an anxious novel about legitimacy, which includes [the question], ‘Am I allowed to be a writer?’”

Her new novel is also a product of anxiety, but in this case, the anxieties surrounding new motherhood. During her first pregnancy, Ms. Groff found herself depressed at the prospect of raising a child in a world marred by war, poverty and environmental disasters. To keep her negative thoughts at bay, she threw herself into a research project about Utopian societies.

“I started reading about idealists. Oneida. The Farm. People who actually threw away society and tried to create their own perfect place to live … Arcadia became a long painful argument with myself—about what you need to do in order to be happy with bringing children into the world.”

Like Monsters, Arcadia is set in bucolic upstate New York and explores themes of community and identity. But while Monsters mines the past, Arcadia reaches into the future, spanning a 50-year period, from 1968 to 2018, as it follows the rise and fall of a Utopian commune, Arcadia. Narrated by Bit, the first child born in Arcadia, the novel feels intimate even as the commune grows to embrace an ever-widening cast of characters. For a novel about idealism, Arcadia is a surprisingly dark book, with children suffering in a society focused on “equality, love, work, and openness to the needs of everyone” but not necessarily education, health or stability. Ms. Groff’s vision of life outside Arcadia is equally grim; readers may find her rendering of a future New York City to be dire, if not apocalyptic.

“When you look at Utopian communities … they have an apocalyptic view of society, which is an extension of their idealism,” she said. “When I was researching it, I kept seeing it over and over again, and I thought it was fascinating—in the same mind of hope and idealism is pessimism.”

Ms. Groff’s own pessimism has abated. Having recently given birth to a second son, Heath, she admits that the fears that accompanied her first pregnancy now feel overblown. It helps, too, that her own life is much more stable than her characters’—and that she lives without a TV and limits her news checks to twice a day. Twitter is her main portal to the publishing world, and while she sometimes longs for New York’s literary community, she has found a sense of calm in Gainesville, where she moved for the sake of her husband, who helps run his family’s local real estate business.

Gainesville may not be particularly glamorous—she calls it “a mix of the deep South and Connecticut”—but she has, over the years, managed to find a good group of friends. It took her longer than she expected, though, and she still feels isolated from time to time. Musing on the origins of Arcadia, she wondered if the book was in part an attempt to stave off her loneliness.

“I wanted really badly to build a community around myself and living in Arcadia was a way [to do that].”

When asked about her next novel, Ms. Groff would say only that it is “very strange”; she hesitated even to describe it as a novel. As for her short stories, she has not yet accumulated enough for a cohesive collection, but continues to write them while she works on her current project.

“Give me five years and I may or may not have another book in the world.”

editorial@observer.com

'When I Was a Child I Read Books.' (Courtesy FSG)

Marilynne Robinson is not amused. “We now live,” she writes at the outset of her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $26.00), “in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.” One of our political parties has descended into outright lunacy while the other responds to widespread financial calamity by proposing lower corporate tax rates. In that passage, Ms. Robinson invokes Walt Whitman, to remind us that the country has been here before, or at least found itself in circumstances equally dire, but also to confront the self-appointed defenders of “traditional values” with the actual spirit of our best traditions:

It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way. In the desperations of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage, equality under law. It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves, have made its citizens weak and dependent.

It is difficult not to quote Ms. Robinson at length, so finely calibrated are her sentences. Here, it’s a tonic to see a rhetoric of such righteous anger turned, for once, against those who believe it is virtuous to attempt to deprive their fellow citizens of aid and succor. She concludes this passage by wondering “how the greatest nation on earth maintains this exalted status while burdened with a population these patriots do not like or respect.” That it is left to one of our finest novelists to say this out loud—instead of, say, the president of the United States—is something worse than shameful.

Many of Ms. Robinson’s targets here are familiar from her previous, equally fascinating collections, 2005’s The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and 2010’s Absence of Mind: the undergraduate drivel of neo-Darwinism and the “New Atheism”; the un-Christian tenor and determined ignorance of much contemporary American Protestantism; the condescension or overt hostility of educated liberals to religion. What is affirmed throughout is an abiding awe in the face of “the tantalizing not-yet-knowable and the haunting never-to-be-known,” and a sense that “we are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final.”

Ms. Robinson is a liberal, tremendously well-read Calvinist, and Calvin’s liberality informs every essay in this book. (She demonstrates that if “Calvin’s liberality” strikes you as an oxymoron, you have not read Calvin.) Much deep good sense is directed against the pseudo-learning of contemporary liberal culture. The popular scientism of our day assumes that genes explain everything about our species. The impulses of compassion or generosity, we are told, are genetically coded; religious experience is associated with activity in specific regions of the brain. These facts are somehow taken to invalidate those impulses, that experience—as if the existence of the visual cortex proved that what we see isn’t real.

Ms. Robinson excels at dismantling such false oppositions. No educated person can harbor serious doubt that all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor; that we and the other apes are descended from a more recent common ancestor; and that natural selection plays an important role in evolution. This tells us precisely nothing about the truth of religion, no matter what fundamentalists of both the Christian and the atheistic stripe might believe. As Ms. Robinson writes in The Death of Adam, “Creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism, the caricature of religion that has seemed to justify Darwinist contempt for the whole of religion.” Everyone who has read a book by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Steven Pinker—today’s defenders of scientism—would do well to also read one by Marilynne Robinson.

In Ms. Robinson’s hands the Christian religion regains its wonder, becomes again the religion of Augustine and Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards and the Frenchman Jean Cauvin, because she wryly defamiliarizes Christianity. Often, as she does so, she defamiliarizes America too, “that guarded place,” as the poet D. A. Powell calls it:

In my Bible, Jesus does not say, “I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free-market principles.” … And we now know, if we want to know, how free and how wise and how principled those markets were, to which—for the greater good, of course—we subordinated the practical concerns apparently so close to the heart of Christ, the feeding and clothing, the tending to the sick and respecting the humanity of the imprisoned. These good works, if they were assisted by means of governments, would make us like the French, they say. Whatever that means. I doubt that this notion is based on any actual knowledge of the French, but if it is, it certainly encourages me in the opinion that the secular have an excellent hope of heaven.

It would be remarkable if anyone besides Marilynne Robinson agreed with everything Marilynne Robinson has to say—it is one of her virtues that she says so much so forcefully. Our slaughter of the Indochinese and the Iraqis, our support for the military dictatorships of Central and South America, should present more of a challenge to Ms. Robinson’s American exceptionalism. And it’s not entirely convincing that Calvinism’s radical individualism is wholly unrelated to the contemporary political malice she rightly decries. Ms. Robinson is too brisk with Marx and Freud (that their worldviews are irreconcilable with each other, as she asserts in Absence of Mind, would be news to, inter alia, Marcuse, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze and Žižek). And she comes up short on popular culture: Hank Williams sang of being so lonesome he could cry, not die—the pathos of the understatement is the point.

But these essays represent what Robinson calls “an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins.” This is what education is for, and this book is a tool for those who would be archaeologists of their own thinking.

Even when one disagrees with her, Ms. Robinson is always worth reading because she is as gifted a stylist as the English language has at present. Sentence after sentence demands to be reread for the pleasure the mind takes in well-made things, especially in the title piece, a meditation on “lonesomeness” and Ms. Robinson’s childhood in Idaho:

We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must staunch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden. … It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium. Still it should be clear why I find the Homestead Act all in all the most poetic piece of legislation since Deuteronomy, which it resembles.

The Homestead Act, she writes, attempted “to give the Western lands over to people in parcels suitable to making individual families the owners of the means of their subsistence”—and here there is an aside: “the language I am using here is nineteenth-century and American.” Ms. Robinson casually pre-empts the inevitable American suspicion of socialist innuendo at the same time that she exposes a general ignorance of the object of suspicion. Part of the joy of reading her is to be found in the manifold levels of meaning and craft at which one might pause to marvel.

In her introduction to the Vintage Spiritual Classics edition of Calvin’s selected writings, Ms. Robinson quotes Thoreau: “Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” No one else is asking these questions, thinking of this common sense, so acutely and resplendently. Anyone who has read Housekeeping (1980) or Gilead (2006) knows that she is a great novelist. It’s time to recognize that Ms. Robinson is also a thinker of the first order, one of the finest we have ever had.

editorial@observer.com

Hari Kunzru. (Photo by Michael Lionstar)

At the start of Hari Kunzru’s sprawling and ambitious fourth novel, Gods Without Men (Knopf, 374 pages, $26.95), we are introduced to an aircraft engineer called Schmidt, a man obsessed with how to “connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit.” Taking refuge in the desert, Schmidt builds an airstrip in order to “summon the only force powerful enough to transcend communism and capitalism.” This force is not political but extraterrestrial and it doesn’t take long before a UFO lands at his amateur airport. Mr. Kunzru describes first contact between Schmidt and the extraterrestrials rather like a colonial encounter between glittering conquistadors and awe-struck, adoring natives. These Aryan aliens, all “blond hair,” translucently pale skin and “noble faces,” seem to transport Schmidt into a world of light. From this point, Gods Without Men jumps backward and forward from 1775 to the present and features (among other things) psychedelic reworkings of the Indian coyote myth, a disappearing child and a simulacrum of the war in Iraq. Unifying these disparate events are “the three pinnacles,” an unusual rock formation that acts as the organizing symbol of the novel, drawing together a compelling aggregate of dysfunctional characters and clashing belief systems.

So far, so strange, but Mr. Kunzru uses his source material well. Schmidt and his UFO landing strip is no invention. The character is based on George Van Tassel, a mechanic and flight engineer who quit his job after World War II and set out—like many would-be mystics—for the desert. He settled in the Mojave, near a place called Giant Rock, a huge boulder considered sacred by native tribes. Van Tassel was first told about the location of the rock from a prospector called Frank Critzer, a crazed German-American who excavated a small mine near the boulder and eventually died there, blowing himself up with dynamite while under siege from local police who suspected he might be a spy. Mr. Kunzru reworks this scene toward the end of the novel, exploiting the historical unknowns behind the event to good effect. Troubled by the threat of nuclear war, Van Tassel—like Mr. Kunzru’s character—built a small airstrip near the rock where he claimed he was visited by aliens. His apocalyptic ravings attracted followers and Van Tassel began to organize UFO conventions, forming a cult around his supposed ability to telepathically channel messages from what he called “Ashtar Command,” a benevolent extraterrestrial intelligence that sought to dissuade mankind from atomic Armageddon. The Ashtar Command cult still exists—it has a confusing website overloaded with pop-up ads for all sorts of New Age remedies, a Star Trek religion where outer space is heaven and aliens are angels.

It’s easy to laugh at such nonsense but Mr. Kunzru employs these factual details as an intriguing starting point for what turns out to be a powerful excavation of the frayed nerves of New Age America. Whether dealing in UFOs, Indian legends or derivative trading systems, Gods Without Men is a novel about the need for faith in a fragmented, postmodern world shorn of grand narratives and credible belief systems.

Despite its ambitious set-up, the novel takes a while to find its feet. Some of the opening sections—particularly the story of Nicky, a disillusioned and debauched British rock star who runs off into the desert because he misses his supermodel girlfriend—are indulgent and unconvincing. The narrative comes alive when we are introduced to Indian-American Jaz, his Jewish-American wife, Lisa, and their autistic son, Raj. Mr. Kunzru uses Jaz and Lisa to develop a series of thematic counterpoints that question the role of faith in shaping identity. The cult of Ashtar Command is clearly absurd, but what of Lisa’s Judaism or the pressure from Jaz’s Sikh parents? Are we to mock these first-generation migrants who worry their son will lose all connection with his ethnic self in the New World? Mr. Kunzru’s previous novels have explored the contradictions of postcolonial identity and he shows himself similarly expert at representing the tensions of immigrant America. He portrays the delicate compromises and negotiations Lisa and Jaz have had to make to balance their relationship against the more atavistic pressures of creed and culture with insight and sensitivity. Unfortunately, Raj’s profound autism upsets his parents’ cosmopolitan aspirations. Unable to accept that his condition is untreatable, Lisa turns to books about “self healing, positive visualisation” and hides her reading of New Age pamphlets from her more skeptical husband, “like an Eastern bloc dissident poring over samizdat copies of Havel or Solzhenitsyn.” Jaz is a geek turned trader who “made his living building mathematical models to predict and trade on every kind of catastrophe” but Raj’s autism—and then his mysterious disappearance near the three pinnacles—suggests that even the apparent certainties of mathematics are deceptive.

One of the novel’s most interesting diversions explores Jaz’s work with Cy Bachman, a messianic hedge fund manager who has developed a modeling system called Walter. Like an advanced version of the cosmic communication systems built by the hippies at Ashtar Command, Walter is more than just a computer. It is a system “trained not simply to exploit some temporary price disparity, but to identify and track entirely ad hoc constellations of five, six, seven variables, brief but dazzling phenomena, lightning flashes of correlation”—an attempt, in fact, at a “theory of everything.” Mr. Kunzru has a lot of fun with this idea and soon the Walter program is shorting the Honduran economy and plotting the Dow Jones against “phases of Saturn.” Showing how complex derivative trading systems push mathematical theory into the realms of superstition, Mr. Kunzru undermines our present faith in the free market and reveals the irrational motivations behind ostensibly logical economic models.

Although Lisa looks to unusual diets and New Age therapies to alleviate her son’s condition, she is outraged when she finds Raj wearing a Punjabi charm to him given by her mother-in-law. Upset, she charges off into the desert, precipitating a chain of events that ends with Raj’s disappearance and a Madeleine McCann-style ordeal-by-media for his parents. Although these scenes are credible and the parents’ pain is well drawn, it is hard for the reader to really care what happens to Raj. His miraculous return (which by now the reader can anticipate) is given a further twist as Mr. Kunzru pushes his parents’ already shattered belief systems beyond the breaking point. Hailing Raj’s return as a miracle, Lisa embraces her Judaism and becomes an editor “for a small imprint that specialized in esoteric and mystical books.” In contrast, Jaz is consumed with the fear that his son has been replaced by an alien double. As he takes his family on a final, terrifying quest for a truth that never comes, so his wife reflects on the “blacks and Latinos” she would see reading their Bibles on their way to work: “She’d always felt—not above, exactly, but far away from such people. Now she wished she had her own dog-eared familiar book, something she could clutch in her hand as they made their terrible journey.” Again, the need for a tangible faith manifests itself in a world overwhelmed by uncertainty.

Around this central narrative Mr. Kunzru weaves an array of competing stories, turning the novel into a kaleidoscope of clashing perspectives. We have the slow decline of the UFO community as peace and love turns into drugs and despair. There are shades of Leslie Silko and Cormac McCarthy in the story of an ethnographers’ attempt to record Indian legends, while his wife’s infidelity with one of her subjects ends in a bloody showdown in the mysterious zone of the pinnacle. In one of the most compelling chapters, an Iraqi girl, eager to embrace American pop culture, finds herself living in a mock Iraqi village built in the desert for the purpose of counterinsurgency training. She must perform a disturbing simulation of the war she fled: “When violence was on the menu the villagers had to wear special harnesses over the traditional clothing, so the laser guns could register hits.” The unreality of the set-up and the absurdity of the enterprise allow Mr. Kunzru to quietly satirize another faith—the veracity and credibility of American foreign policy.

Juggling all these different strands Mr. Kunzru maintains pace and excitement but sometimes at the expense of style. The need to manage so much material frequently leads him to summarize, and many characters are insufficiently developed, their perspectives somewhat flattened by the rather slick, overarching narrative voice. Mr. Kunzru shows how despair, dysfunction and boredom drive people to embrace the absurdity of Ashtar Command, but the distance between character and point of view prevents us from really understanding the deeper, psychological attractions. Other ideas blur together as the UFOs are gradually eclipsed by Indian myths and mysterious glowing boys. Are these lost children alien intruders or reflections of the character’s own desire to believe in something? In the end, the different plot strands never quite cohere and we are left hanging, waiting for an answer. But by now we know this is the point and such openness is something to admire rather than criticize. In a world full of clashing ideologies, Mr. Kunzru shows that all we have left is uncertainty. Gods Without Men stands out as a courageous attempt to engage with the complexities of faith and doubt in our postmodern world.

editorial@observer.com

Josh Bell (Photo courtesy of Chris Lee)

When Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in May of 1913, its thorny polyrhythms and pagan-inspired choreography completely unnerved the audience, whose booing and catcalls eventually erupted into a full-blown riot. Even after the police intervened, chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance as bar-room-style brawls broke out in the Parisian aisles, sending the evening into the annals of music history.

There was, however, no noted misconduct at the New York Philharmonic's Wednesday evening concert in Avery Fisher Hall last week (although we did spy several hefty rings that The Observer briefly mistook for brass knuckles). In fact, the most visible action Stravinsky's polytonalities provoked in the audience was a bit of toe-tapping from elderly feet stretched in the aisles.

Wednesday was the first of four performances conducted by the 36-year-old Daniel Harding, who, after getting his start assisting the esteemed British conductor Simon Rattle, frequently trots the globe, leading the world's premier ensembles. Mr. Harding is certainly not one of the most flamboyant of his peers, tending to forgo oversized gestures in favor of succinct, driven movements. The masterful playing of the ensemble conjured visions of the haunting ballet, from the frenetic brass cries in “Dance of the Earth” to the asymmetrically feverish “Sacrificial Dance,” the movement in which the chosen virgin dances to her death. Listening to Stravinsky's piece played by the Phil is like riding an orchestral roller coaster: it’s so visceral one's stomach drops with each forte.

The evening opened with Scottish composer Oliver Knussen's Flourish With Fireworks, a three-minute piece that lived up to its title, sparkling and popping with zeal.

Next up was Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major, which was famously critiqued after its 1881 premiere by Eduard Hanslick in Vienna's Neue freie Presse as “vulgar,” the product of “hideous notation,” particularly the first movement, in which the violin was, as he put it, “pulled, torn, drubbed.” While the solo violin part was deemed practically unplayable by leading violinists of the composer’s day (it requires tremendous endurance), the piece now stands one of the most beautifully lyrical legacies of the famous Russian composer.

Rising to the challenge was violinist Josh Bell, whose immense talent and charming blue-eyed head shots have earned him a loyal following of enamored female fans. He may be—dare we say it?—the Justin Bieber of violin soloists, at least in terms of star power. Mr. Bell's virtuosic mastery of his instrument brought to life Tchaikovsky's work, written while the composer vacationed on the shores of Lake Geneva, recuperating from a bout of depression.

The 44-year-old Mr. Bell first stepped into the spotlight at the age of 14 when he debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Ricardo Muti. Since then, the Avery Fischer Prize recipient and Musical America 2010 Instrumentalist of the Year has enjoyed immense success and a consistently full house, Wednesday night being no exception. Mr. Bell played the demanding passages in the opening Allegro of Tchaikovsky's relentless concerto with superhuman agility, maintaining an intense look of concentration that quickly vanished as he gracefully wiped his brow during the orchestral interludes.

Mr. Bell managed to weave the three movements together into a comprehensive piece, his emotive legatos in the second movement balancing the challenging dance-like cadenzas in the Allegro vivacissimo. Members of his fan club sprang to their feet abruptly after the first movement, awarding their hero a well-deserved standing ovation. Although this was only Mr. Bell's first performance of the week, we had the feeling that he would continue to play to an exuberant full house, perhaps provoking yet another historical fight, should he decide to dole out a limited amount of autographs.

Susanna Phillips as Musetta (Photo courtesty of the Metropolitan Opera)

It was the evening after Christmas in 1900 when the Metropolitan Opera Company, on tour in Los Angeles, premiered La Bohème. It was years before Giacomo Puccini's opera became widely acknowledged as the masterpiece it is, and, just four years old at the time, it was by no means an immediate success, still requiring the star power of soprano Nellie Melba. Ms. Melba, encouraged by the applause, as well as the box office, would return after the final curtain call to sing the grueling “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoore. These days, La Bohème remains one of the only operas that doesn't require such gimmicks to keep the house full, as proved by its triumphant return to the Met this fall.

With Puccini's talent for interweaving dream-like lyricism and dramatic storytelling in a way that still manages to tug on our heartstrings over a century later, it's no wonder that La Bohème, along with Madama Butterfly, Turandot and Tosca, remains one of the most popular operas. Since its California debut, La Bohème has been omitted from only six of the Met's 111 seasons, a testament to its long-standing demand. Franco Zeffirelli's production, which has been impressing audiences with its 19^th century Parisian street scenes and snowy landscapes since 1981 was, per usual, well-received during the six-show run conducted by Louis Langrèe. The talented cast most notably featured Russian soprano Hibla Gerzmava in her Metropolitan Opera debut as the ailing Mimi, and Dimitri Pittas as an incredibly suave Rodolfo.

Based on the play Scènes de la vie de bohème by the French author Henri Murger, the tale follows two pairs of star-crossed lovers and their impoverished friends who mirthfully attempt to keep food on the table of their shabby atelier in the Latin Quarter of Paris. What was especially striking about this production was the palpable chemistry between cast members, who were not only equipped with excellent voices, but equally gifted in dramatic prowess. Ms. Gerzmava, for example, unleashed her powerful instrument capable of producing everything from saccharine pianos to charming giggles at the end of “Mi chiamano Mimi.”

While effectively portraying heavy emotions amidst ill-fated circumstances, the characters were practically carried off of the stage and into the hearts of the receptive audience, who could be heard uttering many a' “Brava” throughout the evening's performance. While opera is certainly not the most realistic of performance genres, on Friday night there was a sincerity present that allowed audience members to truly connect with the characters on stage. As Musetta's “Quando m'en vo” rang throughout the theater, a woman sitting in front of us nudged her husband excitedly and whispered, “This is one of my favorite songs.”

In this particular production, Rodolfo and Mimi were portrayed as young lovers, quick to give into delirious desires and inflated infatuations, particularly in Act I when Mr. Pittas’ Rodolfo urges Mimi to stay home with him, caressing her shoulders as if they had known each other for more than ten minutes. “Sarebbe così dolce restar qui,” (“Wouldn't it be so nice to stay here?”) he sings sweetly in his expressive legato, the promise of indecency as brazen as Ms. Gerzmava's low cut dress. Shorty afterwards, during the spectacular Parisian street scene in Act II, Musetta (a captivating Susanna Phillips) and Marcello (the formidable Alexey Markov) bicker like true lovers at odds in front of a glowing Cafè Momus. But it was during the third act that we were overwhelmed with emotion when Gerzmava and Pittas' voices blended so perfectly in “Addio dolce svegliare,” the believability of the characters combined with a score deftly negotiated by Mr.Langrèe's orchestra bringing The Observer to near tears.

As an opera that has kept the house seats warm, always an evening of enjoyment to both the opera cognoscenti and ignoranti, we await next year when we’re once again charmed by la vie bohème.