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Arlene Sanders
, August 14, 2008
(view all comments by Arlene Sanders)
JAMES NOLAN is a comedic genius.
âDying is easy. Comedy is hard,â British actor Sir Donald Wolfit reportedly pronounced on his deathbed.
We all love comedy, but few can do it. I believe comedy is something you are born with and that it cannot be learned. The great performance comedians of the 20th century you can count on your fingers and toes: Allen, Ball, Bruce, Burnett, Carlin, Cosby, DeGeneres, Gleason, Goldberg, Hope, Jessel, Murray, Nichols & May, Pryor, Radner, Williamsâand Iâm about running out, with three digits still left.
Among writers, the humorists number more, but there are not many.
James Nolan is one of the best. His humor is dry, dark, acerbic, subtle, but occasionally Rabelaisian: Aleichem, Almond, Allen (again), Baggott, Beckman, Bombeck, Franklin, Montaigne, Thurber, Twain, Vidal, Vonnegut, Wilde, Wisniewski, and Wylie come to mind.
Nolan is a Southerner, but not a âdownhomeâ type. Nolan is sophisticated, well-educated and widely traveled. So he has a context to put his Southern characters in, and a rich, rich one it is! In PERPETUAL CARE, he moves from city to city with ease, hunting down great stories and delivering them with wit, aplomb and savoir faire to leave you breathless.
As with Philip Wylieâs âMomâ (âthe thin, enfeebled martyr whose very urine. . .will etch glassâ), women in general, and âMomâ in particularâin the hands of Nolanâget a drubbing:
âIn belligerent silence, Jake pushed his motherâs wheelchair up the steep ramp to the cemetery office, her right leg sticking straight out like the prow of a frigate.â
âLike an ostrich, Mrs. Hokum strained her wrinkled, pointy face to the height of a long, curved neck, trying to see over the top of a paneled counter.â
As do teenagers:
âWhy couldnât Jay have become a normal gutter-punk? . . .with green hair and a shirt-stud in his tongue to click against his front teeth for attention?â
The title story, âPerpetual Care,â is the funniest one. The situationâIâm not giving it up hereâwill absolutely blow you away.
Southerners (I am one) can carry prejudice and discrimination against people, places and things not Southern to ridiculous extremes, and Nolan pokes hilarious fun at all of it.
But this is not to say that PERPETUAL CARE is all comedy; far from it. Below the surface, Nolan lets us know that prejudice is a serious matter, that moms and teenagers deserve to be taken seriously as human beings, and that San Francisco is. . .well, let Nolan tell you!
James Nolanâs deep love and compassion for the zany characters he portrays is always apparent, heightened by the contrast between his true feelings and the shallowness of widespread attitudes he dramatizes for us in his lively and resonant fiction.
His writing is the greatest, his incredible sentences like multi-faceted jewels polished to a high sheen: I challenge you to find English sentences more perfectly and movingly crafted than James Nolanâs.
Read these stories. Savor every word. Enjoy!
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