The Deep Breath Before the Plunge

Well, work is about to get hectic beyond belief - here are a couple of quickies to tide you over, dear reader.

• I went to see the excellent, hilarious Tristram Shandy tonight, which features Steve Coogan playing the best "Steve Coogan" role of his life as the title character, the title character, and as "Steve Coogan", a preening, insecure British actor. Michael Winterbottom - director of the similarly unhinged 24 Hour Party People, also with Coogan - keeps things lose, cutting away from the book to show the ego trips and fuckups that constitute the making of the film. Coogan has a baby in the film, and the neuroses surrounding fatherhood in Sterne's book nicely mirror Coogan's own ambivalence and awkwardness about his son, aging, and his wife. Wait 'til you check out Shandy's birth scene, as rehearsed by Coogan, suspended upside-down in an 8-foot high model of a womb.
• Finished Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex on Monday, after a bit of a struggle. I know I'm pretty much alone in this opinion, but I thought it was good, not great - the most impressive achievement seems to be a narrative voice that is believably gender-indeterminate. We already know Eugenides' genius narrative tricks from The Virgin Suicides; it just seems like the tightly wound ambience of that novel is more his thing than the sprawling epic-ness of Middlesex.