The Meaning of Recognition (11 page)

How does he feel about that? Bad enough to need an analyst, the reassuringly husky Dr Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco, who in
Someone To Watch Over Me
was married to an honest cop.
Theoretically she is on the side of the law here too, but there are complications. In
Analyse This
the mobster’s shrink was played by Billy Crystal, with hilarious results. Taking
over the same situation and spinning it out into a linking theme, Chase transforms a gag into a strange story of perverted love. Transference duly occurs and Tony lusts after her. She is suitably
revolted. Then she gets raped in the basement car park by a pizza joint’s Employee of the Month. The cops are useless. She admits the attraction of Tony’s power when she tells her
sympathetic but powerless ex-husband what would happen if she tipped off Tony about the rapist: her patient would ‘squash him like a bug’.

Her feelings for Tony’s macho strength would give a strict feminist the horrors, but they are surely plausible, and therefore disturbing. She herself is disturbed enough to seek analysis
in her turn. (From Peter Bogdanovich, as it happens: showing once again, as he did in his film
Saint Jack
, what a subtle actor he is.) In the grip of the primeval instincts that it is her
job to stay detached from, Dr Melfi gets more and more screwed up: a token of the grim fact that any kind of entry into Tony’s orbit can have life-threatening results. As for Tony, his
anxiety attacks abate, but he has told her little about the truths that matter most. He has told her what was done to him – violent father, scheming mother – but tells her nothing about
what he has done to other people. A leitmotiv of his reluctant testimony to her is the question of where the ducks go in winter. This reminds us of Holden Caulfield, who wondered the same thing
about fish. But Tony is no young intellectual in the making. Mixing bright broads with his usual diet of rudderless goomahs, he is spiritually drawn towards higher thoughts, but profundity can be
undone in a moment by news that some idealistic agitator on a construction site needs straightening out with a baseball bat. Tony’s clever brain is just another muscle.

The only but abiding complexity of Tony’s character lies in the way he must bring into balance two different considerations. Outside the house, his powers are unlimited. Inside it, he can
affect the behaviour of others only to a certain extent, because they know he won’t kill them. Vivid as it is, this is a real conflict, genuinely subtle and complicated, continually
surprising. Tony’s wife, Carmela, and his children A.J. and Meadow, are forever cutting down to size the very man who would take a long knife to them if they were not his property. Michael
Corleone can shut the door on his wife and children. Tony has to fight them in the kitchen for his unfair share of the lasagna. By comparison, Michael Corleone’s conflict between the evil of
his business and his highly developed sense of right and wrong is a mere excuse for Al Pacino to press his fingers to his weary eyes while the close-up gives us an opportunity to speculate about
the improbable things that have been happening to his hair.

Tony’s crew are a study in themselves, and would remain so even if Tony were to fall foul of the Rico laws and die in gaol like Al Capone. (James Gandolfini’s agent has no doubt been
reminded of this during discussions about his client’s salary.) The supporting characters are developed and deployed through season after season. This is one of the areas in which the
advantage of a TV serial over even the biggest movie really shows up. A movie is always short of time. A serial can keep the corners uncut. Paulie Walnuts isn’t just a swept-back hairstyle
with a few threatening lines. Paulie has insecurities. His pop-eyed humiliation when a Mob boss from the big city fails to recognize him must rank high among documents of all it means for a proud
hoodlum never to make it out of Newark. Big Pussy is given time for us to know him and sort of love him before he meets his fat fate on Tony’s bad-taste boat. They are all given time to be
people like us, in between moments when they give terrifying proof that they are not like us at all.

It’s a crowded field to stand out from, but perhaps Christopher takes the palm. He is a homicidal junkie nut who deludes himself that he might be a writer. Those of us who share the same
delusion can be thankful that we grew up in a different neighbourhood. Here is a dreadful reminder that Goebbels was a novelist: evil can have an artistic sensibility. Christopher dreams of
creation while working destruction. The actor who plays him, Michael Imperioli, is clever enough in real life to have written one of the best episodes of the show. (And Steve Buscemi directed
another, as did Bogdanovich: a series this vital attracts talent as well as generating it.) But Christopher as a character on screen is hopelessly impulsive: it takes an armful of heroin even to
slow him down. In that case it is a bit of a wonder why Tony chose him to succeed, because the choice makes Tony look stupid, which he isn’t supposed to be. If the show has a needless
implausibility, it probably lies there. These American small-screen geniuses are spinning stories bigger than the
Iliad
, but even Homer nods. Aaron Sorkin didn’t need to give his
President a case of MS, and Chase didn’t need to make the stark mad Christopher a candidate for the succession. But Christopher as a future
capo
is still a lot more believable than
Sonny in
The Godfather
. Even Brando, who seldom saw the script before bits of it appeared taped to the scenery (there is an industry legend that some of it was written in felt-tip on
Robert Duvall’s shirt), must have been surprised to find himself saying that a mere pimp ‘could never have outfoxed Santino’. Your mother could have outfoxed Santino: up until
that point, the movie had been busy proving almost nothing else.

As for Tony’s mother, it brings us to the women, and one of the show’s most enthralling aspects. The women are terrific: some of them in the strictest sense of the word. In
The
Godfather
even Connie is a cipher, but
The Sopranos
hasn’t got a single cipher in the line-up. Like Sian Phillips’s Livia in
I, Claudius
, Nancy Marchand’s
Livia in
The Sopranos
is absolute evil made absolutely believable. Nancy Marchand played the up-market proprietress in
Lou Grant
and afterwards got stuck with the patrician role
when she made movies: she was Harrison Ford’s mother in the
Sabrina
remake and might have lived out her career doing similar
grande dame
swan-ons if the part of Tony
Soprano’s mother hadn’t landed in her lap. What she did with it will be studied by serious actresses for a long time to come. In the nursing home, Livia retreated into a second
childhood while still pushing buttons for the murder of her own son. Was she only pretending to be senile? Her death left a gap, but it was ably filled by Tony’s sister Janice. So off-putting
that she reportedly shrank the ratings, Janice is incarnated by Aida Turturro, who shares with her brother John the capacity to freeze your blood with a single facial expression of crazed
intensity. Janice’s back-story is composed of one dippy extravagance after another. She did time on an ashram. She is still drawing welfare cheques for a supposed carpal tunnel syndrome she
acquired while working the steamed-milk machine in a coffee house. Now she wreaks havoc by fulfilling the kinkier sex fantasies of Tony’s subordinates, but her real sexual relationship is
with Tony. She would like to fulfil it by getting him killed. An hour alone with her conversation would be enough to kill anyone. Think of your worst nightmares about females you would prefer to
avoid. Think of being trapped in an elevator with Madame Mao. Janice is worse than that. Carmela, on the other hand, is Tony’s perfect wife, until she starts craving a more sensitive male
touch. She gets it, or dreams of getting it, from Furio, Tony’s most trusted enforcer. Where the melting Carmela is concerned, Furio really is a man of honour. Out of respect for Tony, he
fights off temptation. Carmela, marvellously played by Edie Falco, can’t bear to be without him. Furio burns alive in the fires of thwarted passion. Their star-crossed love is all the more
believable in its tenderness because we know that Carmela’s existence depends on a perverse disinclination to figure out where the money comes from, and that if we ourselves owed any of it,
Furio is the last man we would want to ring our doorbell.

Like her brother A.J., Tony’s daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) has been growing up right there on screen. Meadow has become a beauty, and brighter all the time. By a plausible reaction
to her home circumstances, she wants to be a lawyer, bringing justice to the deprived. She might do for Tony in the end, if he isn’t done for by my favourite woman in the show, Adriana (Drea
de Matteo). Adriana is the paradigm of the young knockout forced into a walking coma by the steadily dawning realization that she has nothing going for her but her looks. Being married to
Christopher doesn’t help. She is just bright enough to know he is a lunatic, but not quite bright enough to see that her insatiable taste for luxury depends on him. As stoned as he is and
with even less to do – she doesn’t even get to kill anyone – Adriana is an easy mark for the Feds. From her they might get the evidence they need to lock Tony away. If we find
ourselves wishing that the law won’t nail him, it’s because he is us. Michael Corleone is us too, but only when we dream of omnipotence. Tony Soprano takes us back to the primeval
forest; to instincts, not dreams. It’s a different kind of vacation from the everyday drag. If you want to know just how exciting life would be if there were no law, here it is.

TLS
, 30 January 2004

Postscript

In its later seasons, fans of
The Sopranos
tend to quarrel with the screen more and more often, and it is a nice question whether this means that the show is more
involving than ever, or has strayed too far from its first principles. I thought Adriana’s death looked like a hasty write-out, and needlessly so, because her inevitable demise had been set
up years before. Or perhaps that was the point: they deliberately made the fatally determined look arbitrary. But shouldn’t Steve Buscemi have given us a few more hints of lethal dementia
before he finally blew his lid? And we can understand why Tony should find reasons for not facing the necessity of killing his cousin, but what about his continuing failure to realize that
Christopher is unemployable even as a homicidal maniac? In TV comedy they call it jumping the shark: the tendency of a long-running show’s writing team to lose faith in the established
narrative precepts, and take refuge in the startling. (The term was first used after the Fonz went water-skiing, but let’s not get lost in detail.) We can put up with it if Tony is in
trouble. We can even understand if Tony is desperate. But if he actually starts losing his taste for power, he is too like us, and we might as well join him in watching history-channel programmes
about Rommel. Nevertheless, the achievement remains. The crew that invented
The Sopranos
won through to the big prize: low-life high art, cordon bleu fast food. People argue about the show
the same way that people must once have argued when walking home through the mud after seeing
Titus Andronicus
. Why couldn’t the broad have picked up a knife? She didn’t have
any
hands
, for Christ’s sake.

At an advanced point in his already prolific career, the Australian writer David Malouf has produced a book of fresh beginnings. Nominally a collection of nine short stories,
Dream Stuff
could just as easily be nine different outlines for new novels, each of them remarkably unlike any novel he has turned out before. If that sounds like a polite way of
reclassifying his novels as expanded short stories, it’s a stricture that he invites. His novels have always left out much of the framework and furniture that most novelists are careful to
put in. On the other hand, what he puts in instead makes them read more like a poetic fermentation than a long short story.

‘Everything spread quickly,’ he says in the title story of
Dream Stuff
: ‘Germs, butter, rumours.’ He is talking about subtropical Queensland, the stamping ground
of his childhood, but he could equally be evoking the luxuriant mental climate of his entire creative life. Fecund is a word that fits him as it fits few other Australian writers. Seen from space,
Australia is a thin, wet edge running only halfway around a colossal swathe of hot rock. For Australia, read austere. A celebrated poem by Judith Wright addresses the largest island’s
anhydrous vastness in the appropriately desiccated vocative: ‘Your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart.’

Chez
Malouf, however, there is scarcely a dry breast to be seen. Propagating itself like honeysuckle on a trellis, his mind exfoliates in the thin wet edge, and everything it dreams up
sends out tendrils, starting new, wild gardens that you couldn’t keep down with a flame-thrower. Aridity being decidedly not his thing, he is thus the least characteristic Australian writer
yet to have reached world prominence, and therefore one of the surest signs that Australia’s literary culture – cosseted in the long years when it scarcely existed – has by now
arrived and is running nicely out of control, the way a culture should.

None of this means that Malouf is an incoherent writer. At his frequent best, and occasionally for a whole book, his prose is as tightly under control as his poetry, and often more so: his poems
usually avoid the prosaic with such success that it is hard to figure out what is going on. In his narrative prose he is more likely to evoke before he implies, achieving a clarity that has helped
to make obvious the main subject on which he has been reluctant to touch. That subject is sexual love, about which, on the whole, he has had less to say than almost any other serious novelist since
Joseph Conrad. In Malouf’s sumptuous corner of a sparse country, there is only one kind of juice that has so far failed to flow. But there are signs in these short stories that it might be
finally on the move.