Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn’t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with “Hey, boss.” She has never paid more than “token attention” to Amby’s athletics, but she needs something to write about, and she wants to be near her youngest grandchild. So she keeps showing up to his training and games, paying attention, seeing what happens. She is open to being amazed, or even just interested. 

In her new nonfiction book, The Season, which came out in Australia last year and will be released in America this month, Garner, the low-key doyenne of Australian letters, whose body of work includes many novels, nonfiction books, diaries, and screenplays, writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness: “There are no seats. Wait, there’s one.” Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: “We’ve won,” she reports, when they have. 

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Left: Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas in Taxi, 1979. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Right: Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, 2009. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok.

Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game, but not as themselves. If you had tuned in on a Wednesday night in 1978, you might have seen a rather weird bachelor amid the usual roll call of dudes with disco medallions. While the other contestants were all throwing scripted innuendos at one lucky lady, there was Andy Kaufman! Except it wasn’t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC’s show Taxi (1979–1983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who’d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed “I won!” when he didn’t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that?

A year later, a certain Pee-wee Herman was on the same show, a then-unknown overgrown boy in a glen plaid suit and red bow tie, played by a twenty-seven-year-old actor called Paul Reubens. Looking like Buster Keaton’s unhinged son, sounding like a hyperactive imp on a sugar high, he had the audience giggling like drunk hyenas soon, too. Crashing The Dating Game wasn’t some sort of elaborate scheme Andy and Paul hatched together, but it’s nice to think about them in split screen: two cartoonish instigators of live-action anarchy, tricksters without any malicious purpose, making comedy out of these unusual characters.

It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Kaufman and Reubens, who are oddly alike in some ways and so different in others. Two fascinating new documentaries try to puzzle out the stories of these two much-missed entertainers. (Reubens died at age seventy after a battle with cancer long-kept secret, in 2023; Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, when he was just thirty-five.) Matt Wolf’s Pee-wee as Himself and Alex Braverman’s wacked-out portrait of Kaufman, Thank You Very Much, provide the best accounts of what powered their singular shenanigans, not to mention the trouble they got themselves into once they crash-landed in the world of showbiz. Read More

Courtesy of Zando Projects.

As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students approached me with what I could see were a bunch of badly printed photocopies. They wanted to know why the work of “the greatest Italian author after Pasolini’s death” was no longer available in English. The author was Pier Vittorio Tondelli and the photocopies were of the first English-language edition of the novel Separate Rooms, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1992.

I had no good answer for them. At that time Luca Guadagnino was not yet the internationally recognized director he is today, and his decision to turn Separate Rooms into a film starring Josh O’Connor was yet to come. Had I known, that would have been the most honest answer: that it would ultimately take a high-end adaptation—which is still in progress—to resuscitate Tondelli’s work in English. (Separate Rooms was reissued in translation this year by Zando in the U.S. and Sceptre in the UK.) In many ways, the question posed by those students seemed to put Tondelli on too much of a pedestal: after Pasolini’s death there have been many great Italian authors—Claudio Magris, Daniele Del Giudice, Fleur Jaeggy, and Gianni Celati, to name a few. But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of Tondelli, including myself, only to hide it somewhere. Read More