Carroll, seldom rising from her chair, her hands splayed on her knees in a manner both helpless and relaxed, renders Didion's intelligent, elegiac cogitation with the toughness, occasional shrewd humor, and even more occasional tremulousness for which it cries. She may be sharp-eyed eagle to the diminutive Didion's sparrow, but the point is less to impersonate a literary light than to portray the writer's considerable power of self-observation and to trace her journey. Engel, for his part, realizes that this relentless, riveting material needs no fuss. You just need to trust the magic of the thinking.
Applying biography to Spalding Gray would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. The New England–bred monologuist, who plunged to his death from the Staten Island Ferry five years ago this week, mined the mental terrain of his neurotic and peripatetic existence in a series of theater pieces ranging over the course of 20 years, from Sex and Death to the Age 14 to Swimming to Cambodia, Gray's Anatomy, and Morning, Noon and Night. So Louisiana State University professor William W. Demastes doesn't go that route in Spalding Gray's America (Limelight Editions, $19.95, 227 pages). Neither does he do much talking to the folks who knew the lumberjack-shirted storyteller other than across his little table festooned with its glass of water. The book boasts a personal foreword by Richard Schechner, guru/leader of the Performance Group, which morphed into the Wooster Group, where Gray first dipped his toes into artistic autobiography. But by and large, this first tome to weigh in on the unique theater artist does not so much chronicle Gray's already-picked-apart life as put the monologues on the couch — the natural habitat, some might say, of the self-reflexive performer himself.
Many of us living in the geographical shadow of the Three Places in Rhode Island (the title of the Wooster Group trilogy built on Gray's mother's suicide) where it all began take a personal, near-familial interest in the monologuist. (This critic saw him perform In Search of the Monkey Girl in a classroom at Northeastern, long before the monologues were the stuff of films and Broadway.) For us, I hope there will be a more penetrating and revelatory book. The best writing in this one is Gray's, as when he compares his work to "collage art, because I'm cutting and pasting my memory." Indeed, the book serves as a sort of Proustian madeleine, conjuring with each Gray-borrowed phrase the remembered satisfaction of the monologues themselves.
Demastes's own prose tends to be repetitive, and the psychological summation — in which he bisects Gray into masculine and feminine, Western and Eastern, finally melding them in the still-death-obsessed Ozzie Nelson of Morning, Noon and Night — is glib. In his Dr. Phil mode, the author even suggests that if there had been a less detached and more dictatorial dad in attendance at the figurative cradle of the mother-smothered performer, Gray "would have been more normal, a culturally acceptable aggressive, autonomous male" — I presume one whose career consisted of playing WASPy diplomats and doctors in the movies and on The Nanny. Instead, Gray aired his emotional and psychiatric laundry with a combination of artistry, wit, and confessional candor that made him a questing, phobic surrogate for us all. And though Demastes huffs and puffs in turning the journey of the introspective exhibitionist he calls "a sort of Zeitgeist in the flesh" into that of the nation in the latter half of the 20th century, the attempt explains the book's title.
