Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Remix

Why It’s Ok to Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle Fiction

Lincoln Michel
January 12, 2018

This morning I took my cup of coffee and laptop to a desk to work on an old short story I’ve been kicking around when I made the greatest mistake any writer can make: I opened Facebook.

Between posts on the current horrors of the Trump administration, my timeline was filled with discussions about Sadia Shepard’s debut short story “Foreign-Returned” in this week’s New Yorker, which the author Francine Prose had been attacking in a series of Facebook posts. Prose was offended by the fact that Shepard’s story used plot elements and even language from a story by the late Mavis Gallant: “the only major difference being that the main characters here are Pakistanis in Connecticut during the Trump era instead of Canadians in post-WW II Geneva,” Prose said, calling the story a “travesty.” Other authors pushed back, with Marlon James, for example, noting that he didn’t notice this “self righteous venom being dished out […] when Jonathan Safran Foer took as much as he wanted from Jessica Soffer’s “Beginning, End.”

The short story I had opened, and then abandoned as I fell into the social media hole, is titled “A Feeling Artist.” It is an homage to Kafka that takes the plot of “A Hunger Artist,” but sets it in a version of the contemporary world where a “feeling artist” finds his popularity eclipsed by young cellphone app and YouTube artists who do rapid-fire feeling acts instead of his carefully crafted longform sadness performances. I don’t know if this story will work or not, but I know that taking an element or two (or even three or four) from a work I love and reconfiguring them into something new is one of my most generative practices. So I immediately got sucked into the debate.

In the comments of Prose’s posts, other authors said they were contacting the New Yorker to complain and many suggested they’d never read something that was inspired by another piece or used similar structures or plots, because they wanted to read “original” pieces with “imagination.” No matter how one feels about Shepard’s story, the ahistoricity of these comments, though predictable, was still surprising. We know, for example, that William Shakespeare’s plays frequently borrowed plots, characters, and even names from other plays. And we know that countless great works of art have been created by adapting Shakespeare’s plots to different settings (Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) or reworking his characters in a new way (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And yet time and again I see authors act like homage, pastiche, and remixing is some kind of lesser form of creation. That it doesn’t count.

Nimmi Gowrinathan in Conversation with John Freeman

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An artform is a conversation between artists. Literature is massive ballroom stretching through time in which authors debate, rebut, woo, and chat with each other. (A genre is perhaps a dialogue in one corner of the party.) They steal ideas to make them better. Or to make them different. Or to expose the problems in them. We know all this, and influences are regularly discussed in English lit classes. And yet, in the world of contemporary creative writing, people get upset when that dialogue is something we overhear.

But why? Why are we writers supposed to pretend? The idea that “finding your voice” means existing in a vacuum, never touching or being touched by other literature, is both absurd and stifling. It also seems to me to be a particular delusion of the world of literary fiction. Poets regularly write response poems and borrow lines. Science fiction and fantasy authors do not hide their influences or who their work is responding to. (The difference here may spring from the different audiences. Genre writers expect their readers to be versed in the tropes and history of the genre, whereas many authors of “literary fiction” still hold to the deluded dream of writing for a general audience or, as one teacher lectured to me, “the guy on the back of the bus.” Why professors assume that men or women who enjoy affordable public transportation can’t be sophisticated readers is another question…)

This false insistence on originality in the literary world hardly ensures more original work, it just encourages a different kind of borrowing, where writers avoid another author’s plots or characters yet mimic their style—anyone who has read a slush pile and perused the stacks of Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders imitations knows what I mean. Isn’t it more interesting to see something familiar in a new context with new ideas than it is to see a pale imitation?

As a young writer, one story that blew open my view of writing was J.G. Ballard’s “The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race.” Ballard’s story is funny and surreal, making you rethink one of America’s darkest moments in a new way. It is also a complete rip-off. It is, as Ballard notes, a rewriting of French symbolist Alfred Jarry’s “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race.” Ballard uses the same structure, same beats, and some of the same language, but by putting it in a different context produces new meaning.

I loved it! I loved both the playfulness of the work—something I found so lacking in most of the literary fiction I was assigned in college—and in the possibilities of pouring new ideas into an existing story’s form. (I once even attempted a story called “9/11 Considered as a Super Bowl Game,” though luckily abandoned it. Trust me, it did not work.) It isn’t the best story I’ve ever read, yet it gave me a key to opening an entire way of writing. In the years since, I’ve found that many of my favorite books do some form of “remixing”: Angela Carter’s brilliant subversions of classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, for example. Or Victor LaValle’s recent rebuttal and homage to Lovecraft, The Ballad of Black Tom. You can insert your own examples: Jean Rhys remixing of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

Reworking an existing text is not proof of a lack of originality, it is a tool to create new works. It is an essential part of how art moves forward, while at the same time connecting us to the art created in the past. It is akin to writing in a form, how infinite poems can be created out of the structure of a haiku or a sonnet. Jonathan Lethem laid this out in his famous, and excellent, essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” where he gave examples of the generative power of appropriation across artforms and throughout history.

None of this is to say that there aren’t issues to be navigated. That authors can’t ape a piece too closely without doing anything original, or that straight up plagiarism doesn’t exist. There are some works that are more fertile for new growth, that present more opportunities for subversion and reinvention. In general, the more famous a work is, and thus the more it has entered the cultural conversation, the more opportunities it presents for remixing. And there are power dynamics: difference between a young writer riffing on a famous novel and an established writer stealing elements from an unread writer without attribution. The legal limits for what should be allowed or what shouldn’t are far too thorny to deal with her.

Is Mavis Gallant, a celebrated author in Canada who is not widely read in the United States, famous enough to remix without attribution? If I were the author or the editor, I would probably have put “after Mavis Gallant” below the title to acknowledge the inspiration. I would do that with Shakespeare too. But I hardly think its omission is a high crime. Not even a misdemeanor when you consider that in the New Yorker’s accompanying interview Shepard is quite open about her influence: “This story owes a great debt to one of my favorite short-story writers, Mavis Gallant, and specifically to her story ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.’”

These are, of course, separate questions from whether the piece works or not. You should read it and decide for yourself! On Facebook, Shepard responded graciously to Prose. She thanked her for discussing the piece and explained her ideas behind it: “my intention in writing ‘Foreign-Returned’ was to rethink/adapt Gallant’s classic story for the present day with Pakistani characters and situations from my own context and community into Gallant’s structure, and in so doing to provide some commentary on our current political climate and the lives of American Muslims.”

Prose, for her part, replied, “it’s still a bit of a mystery, since presumably you have stories of your own to tell, and one would hope that your workshop leaders and editors would have encouraged you to do so.”

If you’re a writer, I say ignore this noise. They may not be your stories to tell, but they are your stories to retell. Take whatever you need, from wherever you want. Stick a Jane Austen character in a Stephen King story. Grab a Dickens plot and bend it around until has a new shape. Mix up Marquez and reimagine Joyce. Jumble up genres, mash together settings, and Frankenstein new living stories out of everything that catches your eye. Remix. Remodel. Rewrite. Use everything and anything you can get your hands on.

And, for god’s sake, turn off Facebook when you’re trying to work.

Lincoln Michel

Lincoln Michel is the author of Upright Beasts and the co-editor of the crime anthology Tiny Crimes. His fiction and criticism appear in Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and elsewhere. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.

LIT HUB

Jonathan Franzen
Illustration by ANTONELLO SILVERINI

Jonathan Franzen's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

Jonathan Franzen (born 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. He has published four novels – The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion(1992), The Corrections (2002; winner of the national Book Award), Freedom(2010) and Purity (2015). He has published a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006) and two books of essays, How to Be Alone (2002) and Farther Away (2012). His most recent book, The Kraus Project (2013), was a translation and extensive commentary upon the work of Karl Kraus.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880). In perhaps the consummate Russian novel, Dostoevsky dramatizes the spiritual conundrums of nineteenth-century Russia through the story of three brothers and their father’s murder. Hedonistic Dmitri, tortured intellectual Ivan, and saintly Alyosha embody distinct philosophical positions, while remaining full-fledged human beings. Issues such as free will, secularism, and Russia’s unique destiny are argued not through authorial polemic, but through the confessions, diatribes, and nightmares of the characters themselves. An unsparing portrayal of human vice and weakness, the novel ultimately imparts a vision of redemption. Dostoevsky’s passion, doubt, and imaginative power compel even the secular West he scorned.

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869). Mark Twain supposedly said of this masterpiece, “Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race.” Everything else is included in this epic novel that revolves around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Tolstoy is as adept at drawing panoramic battle scenes as he is at describing individual feeling in hundreds of characters from all strata of society, but it is his depiction of Prince Andrey, Natasha, and Pierre —who struggle with love and with finding the right way to live —that makes this book beloved.

3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925). The Trial is not just a book, but a cultural icon; Kafka is not just a writer but a mindset—“Kafkaesque.” Here, Everyman Josef K is persecuted by a mysterious and sadistic Law, which has condemned him in advance for a crime of which he knows nothing. Modern anxieties are given near-archetypal form in this parable that seems both to foretell the totalitarian societies to come and to mourn our alienation from a terrible Old Testament God.

4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27). It’s about time. No, really. This seven-volume, three-thousand-page work is only superficially a mordant critique of French (mostly high) society in the belle époque. Both as author and as “Marcel,” the first-person narrator whose childhood memories are evoked by a crumbling madeleine cookie, Proust asks some of the same questions Einstein did about our notions of time and memory. As we follow the affairs, the badinage, and the betrayals of dozens of characters over the years, time is the highway and memory the driver.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Perhaps the most searching fable of the American Dream ever written, this glittering novel of the Jazz Age paints an unforgettable portrait of its day — the flappers, the bootleg gin, the careless, giddy wealth. Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning, and the novel’s narrator, Nick Carroway, brilliantly illuminates the post–World War I end to American innocence.

6. Absalom, Abalom! by William Faulkner (1936). Weaving mythic tales of biblical urgency with the experimental techniques of high modernism, Faulkner bridged the past and future. This is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a rough-hewn striver who came to Mississippi in 1833 with a gang of wild slaves from Haiti to build a dynasty. Almost in reach, his dream is undone by plagues of biblical (and Faulknerian) proportions: racism, incest, war, fratricide, pride, and jealousy. Through the use of multiple narrators, Faulkner turns this gripping Yoknapatawpha saga into a profound and dazzling meditation on truth, memory, history, and literature itself.

7. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (1839). (See below.)

8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” So begins the Russian master’s infamous novel about Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who falls madly, obsessively in love with a twelve-year-old “nymphet,” Dolores Haze. So he marries the girl’s mother. When she dies he becomes Lolita’s father. As Humbert describes their car trip —a twisted mockery of the American road novel —Nabokov depicts love, power, and obsession in audacious, shockingly funny language.

9. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940). Stead said that writing this novel “was like escaping jail,” and one feels that great cathartic sweep as the dark side of family life unreels through astonishing scenes pitting Sam Pollit, the egotistical father “who loves children,” against his wife Henny, a household hetaera subject to rages, or his fourteen-year-old daughter Louisa, a precocious, hulking girl whose break for freedom crowns the book. Though this novel is semiautobiographical, Stead transforms personal revenge against her own outsized father into revelation.

10. Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934). The Icelandic Nobel laureate’s best novel is a chronicle of endurance and survival, whose stubborn protagonist Bjartür “of Summerhouses” is a sheepherder at odds with inclement weather, poverty, society in particular and authority in general, and his own estranged family. Laxness unflinchingly dramatizes Bjartür’s unloving, combative relationships with his step-daughter Asta and frail son Nonni (a possible authorial surrogate)—yet finds the perverse heroism in this bad shepherd’s compulsive pursuit of freedom (from even the Irish sorcerer who had cursed his land). This is an antihero for whom readers will find themselves cheering.

Stendhal

Appreciation of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma by Francine Prose

Opening The Charterhouse of Parma is like stepping into the path of a benevolent cyclone that will pick you up and set you down, gently but firmly, somewhere else. You can still feel the tailwind of inspiration, the high speed at which Stendhal wrote it, and you can’t help admiring its assurance and audacity.

Stendhal marks the boundaries of the more traditional nineteenth-century novel, and then proceeds to explode them. Just as Fabrizio keeps discovering that his life is taking a different direction from what he’d imagined, so the reader keeps thinking that Stendhal has written one kind of book, then finding that it is something else entirely. Stendhal writes as if he can’t see why everything —politics, history, intrigue, the battle of Waterloo, a love story, several love stories —can’t be compressed into a single novel. The result is a huge canvas on which every detail is painted with astonishing realism and psychological verisimilitude.

First you are totally swept up in Fabrizio’s peculiar experience of the Napoleonic wars, then moved by the Krazy Kat love triangle involving Fabrizio, Mosca, and Gina, and throughout, astonished by the accuracy of Stendhal’s observations on love, jealousy, ambition, and of how the perception of biological age influences our behavior.

I love the way Stendhal uses “Italian” to mean passionate, and how he falls in love with his characters, for all the right reasons. One can only imagine how Tolstoy would have punished Gina, who is not only among the most memorable women in literature, but who is also scheming, casually adulterous, and madly in love with her own nephew. Each time I finish the book, I feel as if the world has been washed clean and polished while I was reading, and as if everything around me is shining a little more brightly.

THE TOP TEN

Why Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina transcends the ages

Five writers give their personal takes on the appeal that makes Anna Karenina a literary masterpiece


Jilly Cooper
Sunday 2 September 2012 00.05 BST

Francine Prose, author of Blue Angel and My New American Life

Anna Karenina is probably my favourite novel. More than any other book, it persuades me that there is such a thing as human nature, and that some part of that nature remains fundamentally unaffected by history and culture. I try to re-read it every few years. Each time, perhaps because I'm older and have experienced more, I find things I never noticed before. Not only is it a great source of pleasure, but I inevitably feel as if I'm getting a sort of pep talk from Tolstoy: Go deeper. Try harder. Aim higher. Pay closer attention to the world. It's orchestral, symphonic, full of distinctive melodies, parallels and variations that keep reappearing, some of which we notice, none of which we need to notice in order for them to operate on our subconscious. There are so many virtuosic set pieces (the skating party, the ball, the mushroom-picking expedition, and, my God, the race during which Vronsky breaks his horse's neck) but also small, powerful, resonant moments: I've always loved the scene in which Anna, having met the charming Vronksy, returns home to her husband and is struck by how unattractive his ears are. How could something like that not stand up to, and transcend, the so-called test of time?

Mavis Gallant / The ice wagon going down the street

“THE ICE WAGON GOING DOWN THE STREET” 

BY MAVIS GALLANT

BIOGRAPHY

FRANCINE PROSE

Perhaps one reason why I so love the ending of Mavis Gallant’s story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” is that I’ve never quite understood it. I always think that if I reread it one more time, its meaning will disclose itself. Like the story it concludes, the ending seems perfect, mysterious, profound. It is also wildly original, almost “experimental.” I can’t think of anything else, in fiction, remotely like it.

Compressed, dense, and beautifully written, Gallant’s story is even harder to summarize than most, but here goes. A Canadian named Peter Frazier and his British wife, Sheilah, are spending a lazy Sunday morning in Toronto, at Peter’s sister’s apartment, where they have wound up living with their two children after a long, unsuccessful foray into “world affairs.” That is how they describe their years in postwar Europe, during which Peter held a series of low-level jobs, including a stint as a filing clerk at an international agency in Geneva.

A few lines into the story, “Peter thinks, Agnes Brusen, but there are hundreds of other names.” Much later, we learn that Agnes—a mousy, religious fellow Canadian from a small prairie town—was Peter’s officemate in Geneva.

In an extended flashback, we observe Peter’s relationship (more like a standoff) with Agnes: polite, oddly competitive, rife with misunderstanding and vague mistrust. After a costume party at which the normally teetotalling Agnes gets drunk and Peter is asked to take her home, Agnes tells Peter how, as a girl, she used to wake up early to watch the ice wagon going down the street—a rare moment of privacy for a child from a large, poor family. There follows yet another misunderstanding, this one involving sex, which they don’t have. But two days later, back at the office, they have a conversation that, we feel, is the most honest, revealing, and intimate exchange Peter has had, or will ever have, with another human being in his life. Agnes, we realize, could be Peter’s shadow self, a creature constituted from all the things about himself that he will never admit to anyone, least of all his wife.

When the story circles back to that lazy Sunday in Toronto, we are reminded that his encounter with Agnes has been very much on Peter’s mind. “Agnes is the only secret Peter has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help. . . . Peter wonders what they were doing over there in Geneva—not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers.” And then the story does the remarkable, unprecedented thing, its point of view bouncing around in time and space, then rocketing off into a universe of irremediable mistakes, inconsolable loss, and endless yearning:

He thinks of the ice wagon going down the street. He sees something he has never seen in his life—a Western town that belongs to Agnes. Here is Agnes—small, mole-faced, round-shouldered because she has always carried a younger child. She watches the ice wagon and the trail of ice water in a morning invented for her: hers. He sees the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk. Nothing moves except the shadows and the ice wagon and the changing amber of the child’s eyes. The child is Peter. He has seen the grain of the cement sidewalk and the grass in the cracks, and the dust, and the dandelions at the edge of the road. He is there. He has taken the morning that belongs to Agnes, he is up before the others, and he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn’t know. He could keep the morning if he wanted to, but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache and remorse and regrets, and this is life. . . . He touches Sheilah’s hand. The children have their aunt now, and he and Sheilah have each other. Everything works out, somehow or other. Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

BRICK

DRAGON

Mavis Gallant / Cinema

Mavis Gallant / Diaries

Mavis Gallant / In Appreciation

Mavis Gallant / Imagine Paradise

Mavis Gallant / In Italy / Short story

Mavis Gallant / The Hunger Diaries

Mavis Gallant / The Art of Fiction

Mavis Gallant / Hungry for Details

Obituaries / Mavis Gallant

Jhumpa Lahiri / Mavis Gallant

My hero / Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje

Peter Orner / My Father and Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant in The New Yorker

Mavis Gallant by Deborah Treisman

Mavis Gallant / The ice wagon going down the street

Margaret Atwood reads Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant / Second Glance / Reviews

Mavis Gallant / A brief survery of the short story

An Interview with Mavis Gallant

Russell Banks on Mavis Gallant’s Montreal

Author denies plagiarism in New Yorker story modelled on Mavis Gallant tale

Airelle Perrouin / ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant

The Way Vivid, Way Underappreciated Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

RIMBAUD

Mavis Gallant / La vogageuse immobile

Mort de la nouvelliste canadienne Mavis Gallant

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Mavis Gallant / Cuando éramos casi jóvenes / Reseña

Mavis Gallant / Maestra canadiense del relato corto

Los cuentos de Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant / Naturalidad que desarma

Mavis Gallant / Viaje a una nueva vida y a un sueño pasado

CUENTOS

Mavis Gallant / Prólogo (1960)

Mavis Gallant / Cuando éramos casi jóvenes (1960)

Mavis Gallant / El carro del hielo calle abajo (1963)

Francine Prose / Nicole Holofcener's Beautiful Imperfectionns

Nicole Holofcener’s 

Beautiful Imperfections

by Francine Prose

Nicole Holofcener’s new film, Enough Said, opens with a shot of its heroine, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), wrestling a bulky, “portable” massage table out of the trunk of her car. In the scenes that follow, we rapidly become acquainted with the challenges of Eva’s life as a masseuse: the intimate contact with a body one might not choose to know quite so intimately, the necessity of enduring the nonstop, narcissistic chatter of a client who might just as well be talking to herself. At various points throughout the movie, we watch Eva lug the heavy table up a long flight of stairs to the home of a young man who stands at the top of the steps and watches her struggle without any awareness of the fact that it might be thoughtful, or simply polite, to offer to help.

Funny and romantic on the surface, tough-minded and often sharply satiric underneath, Holofcener’s comedies remind us, as few Hollywood films do, that people work for a living; they support themselves and their families, they pay their rent and their bills. They have more or less money than their friends, labor at glamorous or demeaning jobs, live in grander or more modest dwellings—and these differences in salary and status are significant, especially to those at the lower end of the spectrum.

James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Enough Said

In Friends With Money (2006), Jennifer Anniston plays a woman who is barely getting by, a former teacher reduced to cleaning houses, while her close friends live in luxury, writing television scripts, designing clothes, collecting the proceeds from a trust fund, renovating their homes, and attending charity benefit dinners. In the brilliant (and very dark) Please Give (2010)—which takes aim at heartless New York real-estate envy and a culture in which a mother can best express her maternal love by buying her daughter absurdly expensive designer jeans—the most sympathetic character, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), is a technician at a mammography center, and the opening credits appear over a montage of women’s breasts being positioned for the X-ray machine.

After watching Holofcener’s work, you may find yourself thinking about how frequently characters in movies seem to have been assigned their jobs at random, merely in order to give them something to do. Who can remember what the women in Bridesmaids do when they’re not preparing for the wedding? And though we’re told that the Ben Stiller character in Meet the Fokkers is a nurse, it seems to be mainly for the purpose of getting a laugh and inspiring the scorn of his prospective father-in-law. In a Holofcener film, a character’s job is what she does, and, whether she likes it or not, whether or not she chooses to define herself by how she is employed, it is a major—and a defining—aspect of her identity. InWalking and Talking (1996), Anne Heche is a therapist in training; in Lovely &Amazing (2001), the Catherine Keener character goes to work at a one-hour photo shop.

Lionsgate

Jake Gyllenhaal and Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing (2001)

The fact that they have credible (if not necessarily gratifying) jobs is by no means the only way in which Holofcener’s men and women seem more like people we know, or might know, than do most of the one-dimensional figures we have grown accustomed to seeing on screen. She’s not afraid to let her characters be at once flawed and appealing, strong and weak, damaged and healthy, generous and self-centered; even the most clear-sighted must cope with disabling blind spots. They seem like human beings, and if they behave heroically, as they often do, theirs is the sort of heroism that enables an ordinary person to get through an ordinary day without needing to defuse a ticking bomb or save their families from a spectacular, special-effects apocalypse.

Because so many large and small elements in Enough Said strike us as being so plausible—the well-drawn characters, the cars they drive (Eva drives some sort of low-end sedan), their furniture and clothing (one can tell how much their outfits cost), Eva’s loving and nuanced relationship with her daughter (Tracey Fairaway), who is about to leave for college, the reprehensible manner in which Eva’s otherwise sympathetic friends (Toni Colette and Ben Falcone) discuss whether or not to fire their maid—we’re willing to accept the central coincidence on which the plot hinges. Eva finds herself falling in love with a man named Albert (James Gandolfini)—also divorced, also the father of a daughter about to leave home for college—who turns out to be the ex-husband of Eva’s new massage client, Marianne (Catherine Keener). A poet so famous that adoring fans recognize her when she is out hiking, the stylish and beautiful Marianne is Eva’s idea of perfection.

Flattered that Marianne values her company, Eva continues the friendship even after she realizes that the ex-husband about whom Marianne is so unreservedly and gleefully nasty is none other than Albert. Indeed, Eva presses Marianne for more information about Albert’s failings, in part because it allows Eva to view him from two perspectives at once, and because Marianne’s complaints seem to contain an implicit warning about a future that may lie in store for Eva, whose own first marriage failed. Alone with Albert, Eva gazes at him with the adoring eyes of the newly in love, besotted by his charm, his sweetness, by the surprise of discovering that an overweight, middle-aged man could be so sexy, and by the irresistible allure of the fact that they appear to share the same sense of humor. But gradually she begins to see what Marianne saw: a fat, sloppy “loser” with the repellent habit of swirling a corn chip in his guacamole in order to separate the avocado from the onion. It’s as if Eva is having the rare experience of enjoying the exultant beginning and suffering the unpleasant ending of a love affair—all at once.

The parts have been written with sufficient depth and wisdom that, under Holofcener’s skillful direction, the actors never seem to be movie stars impersonating people. Rather, they disappear into the vulnerable and self-doubting characters they play without a hint of the preening vanity that so often causes cinematic performances to seem forced and shallow. It’s fascinating to watch Louis-Dreyfus’s mobile face twist and contort itself into expressions of shame, chagrin, bemusement, and regret, just as it is at once instructive and moving to be reminded that the late James Gandolfini was not Tony Soprano but rather an immensely gifted actor who became famous for his portrayal of a Mafioso. Here he projects the uncertainty and the vitality of a guy with a big heart and a sharp mind, a man whose sense of pride and personal dignity is undiminished by his pained awareness that he really needs to tidy up his house and lose some weight.

The extent to which we come to believe in—and care about—these people can be gauged by the intensity of our discomfort during an excruciating scene in which Eva drinks too much wine at dinner with Albert and her friends, and begins to channel Marianne. She accuses Albert of overeating, offers to buy him a calorie book, informs the increasingly uneasy party that Albert is incapable of speaking in a whisper, and glares with hate at him when (sure enough) he swishes a chip in the guacamole to herd the onions off to one side.

We are aware, as Albert is not, of Eva’s friendship with Marianne. But the fact that we are in possession of knowledge unavailable to a character does not (as it often does, in the hands of a less accomplished artist) diminish our respect for that character and his intelligence. And when, in the car going home, Albert angrily asks why he feels as if he had been having dinner with his ex-wife, it doesn’t seem like the culmination of a tricky plot twist but instead like evidence of a talent that V.S. Pritchett identified and praised in the work of Turgenev: his ability “to convey how everyone is aware of everyone else as if they were in telepathic communication with one another’s passing thoughts.”

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that, after much grief and misunderstanding, the lovers ultimately come to realize that they can’t live without one another. It is what I suppose could be called a Hollywood ending, and those of us who have been watching a lot of premium-cable-channel TV (dramatic series in which things turn out to be much more catastrophically awful than anyone might have expected) may find themselves thinking, for a moment, that a less neat and cheerful conclusion might have been more lifelike, more real.

But only for a moment. Because, by the end of Enough Said, we desperately want Albert and Eva to be reunited. This feeling is a great deal like our desire to see the lovers marry in the last act of a Shakespeare comedy or in the final pages a Jane Austen novel: even the most jaded of us still want to believe that it is possible for flawed and imperfect humans to love one another—and to be happy. Give us something better and deeper than what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood, and, like the audience with which I watched the film, we’ll by gladdened, even moved to tears, by a Hollywood ending.

September 20, 2013, 4:53 p.m.

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS