I'll Take You There

September 19, 2016
Not long after film scholar Felix Funicello turns 60, a very strange thing starts happening. At the empty theater in New York City where he normally shows classic movies to his film group, two ghosts show up instead, with reels of their own. The “movies” they show Felix are of his own childhood, which he not only watches but also literally reenters, experiencing a kind of dual awareness of the present and his memories of the past, primarily the fights between his two older sisters. The ghosts in charge are women who were silent film–era heroines, including Lois Weber, an actress and eventual powerhouse director. While it’s clear that Lamb (We Are Water) intended this framework as a kind of celebration or heralding of unsung women, the setup feels not like illuminating magical realism but simply like far too much of a stretch. When he’s not hanging out with ghosts, Felix is the encouraging father of Aliza, his adult daughter trying to make a name for herself as a journalist in present-day New York City. With both humans and the supernatural, Felix’s relationships feel forced, awkward, and unlikely, in no small part because of his trite, preachy wisdom: “Bad things can happen to good people. Bad people do sometimes thrive and get away with terrible transgressions.” However, nearly 200 pages in, Felix watches the “movie” of the story of his sister Frances, who was adopted in the early 1950s, a few years before Felix was born. Frances’s birth mother, Verna, was 17 years old and married to a man in the Merchant Marines who was oversees when she became pregnant by Felix’s uncle. After giving birth to Frances, alone and prematurely in a hotel bathroom, she died. Verna’s story makes up the bitter, believable, and well-told last third of the book, raising the question why Lamb didn’t chuck the ghost and movie shtick, along with Felix’s corny narration, to simply write about three generations of the Funicello family.

October 15, 2016
An aging film scholar is visited by elegant Hollywood ghosts bearing interactive home movies of his childhood."Welcome to your life, Felix Funicello!" Film expert Funicello is one of the few people who would be able to place the "translucent females" who appear to him one night at the Garde, the old vaudeville theater in New London, Connecticut, where he holds his Monday night film club. They are the shades of underrated silent-movie director Lois Weber and the leading lady of one of her pictures, Billie Dove, and they have returned from the afterlife to enlighten Felix about his past. "Now as soon as you've grounded yourself in the scene," Weber explains, "you will be a child again, inside your home on Herbert Hoover Avenue, directed by your 6-year-old brain." Felix is sucked right into the action and starts narrating in 6-year-old. "My busquito bites are itching me like crazy!" In the course of this and subsequent screenings, Funicello family secrets involving anorexia, unwanted pregnancy, and other female troubles are revealed. In between movie nights, Felix talks on the phone with his daughter, Aliza, a writer for New York magazine. Through her, he gets his exposure to current slang and culture, from polyamory to post-feminism to the new unisex application of terms such as "balls-to-the-wall" and "grow a pair." In return, he helps Aliza with the feature she's been assigned on the old Miss Rheingold beauty contest, to which the family has a connection. This novel is the print version of a narrative designed to appear in an app, with multimedia components and effects. It's possible that the idiosyncrasies of Lamb's (We Are Water, 2013, etc.) sixth novel will work better in that format. There's a novel in here somewhere, buried under film trivia, corny commentary, a convoluted premise, and a 17-page article about the Miss Rheingold contest.

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October 15, 2016
Lamb reprises film professor Felix Funicello from Wishin' and Hopin' (2009) for this novel that is part trip down memory lane, part ghost story, and part nod to feminists everywhere, of every era, as the dedication reads. Felix runs a Monday-evening film club at the Garde, a classic movie palace that has been recently restored. There, he is visited by the ghosts of two historical figures: Lois Weber, an early Hollywood screenwriter and director, and Billie Dove, a star of the silent screen. They bring reels of film containing the movie of his life, and these allow him to revisit scenes from his childhood in the fifties and sixties, sometimes as a watcher, sometimes as an actual participant. Meanwhile, Felix's daughter, Aliza, who works at New York magazine, writes an article about the Miss Rheingold contest, a pop-culture phenomenon that many older readers will remember and that is threaded throughout the book. The novel is a bit of a hodgepodge and tends to veer into exposition, but with two Oprah's Book Club selections under his belt, Lamb has a following.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)