Celeste Price, the protag of Alissa Nutting‘s 2003 novel Tampa, is selfish, unloving, perverse and good-looking. She is a married middle-school teacher sexually excited by fourteen-year-old boys. The grabber is that this is all she cares about: intimate time with these boys, specifically Jack and then Boyd. Thus Nutting is right to make the book so sexually descriptive.

A first novel, Tampa is almost inconsequential but, as well, it is vigorous and certainly not boring. Best of all is that Nutting can write, the finesse here positively clear.

In the 1930s, a 68-year-old man was considered an old man.  Thus Louis, the hero of the Francois Mauriac novel Viper’s Tangle (1933), is an old man—one afflicted with angina pectoris, in addition to being obsessed with money and riled by his family.

He is not much different from a Flannery O’Connor sinner-infidel except that he is studied psychologically, by the author, to a degree unheard-of in an O’Connor fiction.  The true Catholic, the Christian, in the story is Isa, Louis’s wife, and the old man implacably scorns her religion.  Yet, after Isa dies, Louis finds himself penning the words, “Oh God, oh God—if only You existed!”

Does God exist?

After all, even Louis’s loving granddaughter, Janine, avers about herself and the other relatives that  “our principles [Catholic ones] remained separate from our lives.”  All the same, this will not remain the case with Louis, who discovers that God does exist.  The world in Viper’s Tangle finally and sadly offers nothing.  Louis finds the Deity offering redemption.

The plot in this novel is pretty unimpressive, but character and style aren’t.  Mauriac’s prose is pellucid and his attitude beautifully sympathetic.  It is Christian fiction at its finest.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis serves as mother church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, opines that “the woke generation” is creating a “miserable world” for itself. He knows this hokey group is basically authoritarian, and by mentioning that “we’ve been through socialist governments” [which have flatly failed], Daltrey proves his awareness that the wokesters frequently smile on socialism.

Hooray for a great singer of great songs: “See Me Feel Me,” “Pinball Wizard,” “The Song Is Over.” And, of course, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (apposite).

The family of 90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine, including Colette herself, joined the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. Her brother Jean-Pierre was sent to a German concentration camp where he died in 1945. In Anthony Giacchino‘s 24-minute documentary “Colette,” which I saw on YouTube, the haunted, usually unsmiling Colette, accompanied by a history student named Lucie Fouble, visits the defunct camp for the first time. Colette calls her brother “a man of steel,” and an intelligent one at that. The siblings’ mother averred that it was Colette, not Jean-Pierre, who should have died. The woman has never really gotten over this remark.

Colette and Lucie do not remain dry-eyed at the camp. Neither will the viewer. “Colette” is poignant. Not that it matters, but it won an Oscar for the best short doc of 2020. Here we see the sensitivity of two ordinary women in the face of malignant history.

(In French with English subtitles)

It is clear from his film, Dragged Across Concrete (2019), that writer-director S. Craig Zahler wants to bring urban realism back to cinema. A fictional city, Bulwark, is meant to be a typical significant American city with all its crime and tension. Bulwark might as well be today’s Minneapolis, and, in point of fact, a policeman played by Mel Gibson gets suspended from his job for doing something a bit similar to what Derek Chauvin did. He does it not to a black man but to a Mexican (there is no rioting), albeit black criminals are certainly here. White ones too.

All the while, the facts of life are conservative, not liberal. No one in the film is actually woke. The wife of Gibson’s Officer Ridgeman (Lauren Holden) fears she has become a racist. There is enough racist—and “racist”—language to make any liberal elite shed a pansy tear. And Jennifer Carpenter, as John Nolte describes, enacts “a professional woman desperate to be home with her baby, to be a full-time mother.”

Concrete is a fascinating movie, a disturbing caper tale. It is carefully shot with few closeups and contains cool, curious dialogue, even if Zahler’s writing seems slightly inauthentic in the film’s last fifteen minutes. Looking intimidating, Gibson is okay but in an easy part. Tory Kittles is in a harder one and succeeds memorably.