Daily Blague

Yesterday, I went down to the Angelika to see Year of the Dog, Mike Smith's eccentric but very funny movie about a woman whose life is undone by the loss of a dog. I don't think that I've ever really noticed Molly Shannon before, doubtless because I haven't watched Saturday Night Live since the late 1970s.

But it was Peter Sarsgaard who stuck in my mind. What a protean actor he is! In Jarhead, I thought he must be Kiefer Sutherland's younger brother. His interesting drawl, I suppose, is the legacy of a childhood in southern Illinois. When I got home, I had to see something else with him in it, and I hit upon The Dying Gaul, Craig Lucas's extremely powerful romantic triangle, with Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott. I think that it's Mr Sarsgaard's finest performance. He makes grimness unusually interesting.

As long as I was in the neighborhood, I went to McNally Robinson on Prince Street and bought Hermione Lee's new biography of Edith Wharton. I had intended not to, at first. I read R W B Lewis's biography when it came out in 1975, so I know the story. But the rave reviews reminded me how much I'd enjoyed Ms Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, another book that I thought somewhat unnecessary when it appeared. And I realized that over thirty years have passed since the Lewis book was new.

I also yielded to an impulse and bought Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts. I don't know that I'm going to like it, but I've bit into it. The book in my pile that I really want to read is Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, but I'm saving it as a treat.