The Brooklyn Rail

John Domini’s work was appreciated, but not enough. He was a leading critic of literary fiction, a master of the review, writing during a period when fewer and fewer people read literary fiction. He was also among the finest American fiction writers of this century, a writer whose later-life success in the genre may have kept him from becoming, to the degree one can, a literary superstar. I hate to say this of any colleague, especially of a friend and mentor like John, but he was a writer’s writer. All of his books taught me something about writing and storytelling, about the tension between linearity and imagination, between narrative work and linguistic play, between wonder and skepticism. His many books reveal a brilliant mind rampant in the language of place and time. His reputation as a creative writer rests mainly on his four narrative explorations of Neapolitan life. As a Neapolitan American, I appreciate those books most, but I think John’s collection of stories, Movieola! distills the spirit of his work, an infectious spirit, which inhabits, I hope, this brief take:

Movieola! speeds film (the product, the industry) to a crawl up the slick side of a monumental statue, its language pulling us by the scruff and pressing our eyeballs to a lens lodged in the statue’s mouth, a window on the whirling cogs behind the scripted scenes, a portal to the full and empty hearts of engineers in make-up, meetings, and lonely rooms where they freebase fantasies for mass consumption. This collection of counter-narratives conjures the Hollywood hegemon’s minions in unresolved arcs. Their acts of making form, the never-ending plot.

Production lies naked and bleeding, as John’s furious narrators deconstruct the jaded fabrication of cinema, trailer by storyboard by pitch by credit, each phase built on notions of audience as a flock of gulls. These fast-talkers jitter their barbed way through stories that run from lightbulb to curtain, each its own treatment of a cineaste’s brainchild for “the lullaby of the megaplex, the night language of a nation.” Through them the author enters the mind of the movies and tours it like a national park.

Movieola! is a masterwork, the culmination of forty years’ writing about culture machines. A few sentences from the book’s final piece distill its essence like a perfectly framed image: “Tonight, you came out for something bigger and more mindless. The full in-the-round. And look where you wound up, with credits that turn cannibal.” Bon appétit.