Word: mcphee
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NEIL SIMON wrote only one successful play after The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Then he moved to Los Angeles. Prisoner is his ode to New York City, a typical Simon comedy that catalogues the neurotic lives of Mel (Michael Achtman) and Edna (Sarah McPhee) Edison: boy lives with girl, boy loses job, girl gets job, boy has breakdown, boy gets girl. Assaulted by noisy cars, barking dogs, loud neighbors, and Valium that doesn't work, Mel and Edna step into the ring with The City and survive, bruised and battered but still whole--and still suffering. As Mel asks...
...somehow, the older, tamer forests of the Berkshires and the Adirondacks suit McPhee better than the wild barren extremities of the 49th state, America's last frontier. McPhee is too much the Princetonian descendant of the painstaking Yankee silversmith. He crafts nice pieces for nice people to read in their nice New Yorkers when they're through looking at the cartoons, inferring polite, understated meanings with a precise style and weightless control. But one knows his Alaska is an idealized one to read about in front of the fire on a cold Greenwich, Conn. night accompanied by 12-year...
Unlike McGinnis, best known for his classic, The Selling of the President 1968, McPhee is not a journalist. He is rather an impeccable craftsman, a quiet, careful worker whose pieces are intricate productions of exemplary quality. He is patient, willing to wait until surfaces dissolve and deeper meanings emerge. McPhee never really raises his perfectly modulated voice...
...WHILE McPhee subtly leads one to gentle meditation and an appreciation of sanity in even the wildest frontiersman, McGinnis plunges into the underside of the Alaska myth, where the American Dream in its last pure expression rips rapidly across the forests and tundra in an oily fever of seedy opportunism, watching, listening, talking, poking around. He observes everything, and lets it all accumulate. He records demythologized Alaska more obnoxious and squalid than it is majestic and forbidding. Along with the peaks, glaciers, freedom and big bucks, he gives us the alcoholic cabin fever of the Arctic winter, the grimy linoleum...
McGinnis is not the writer McPhee is. Going to Extremes is little more than hastily scrawled notes on paper wrinkled from being stashed in the author's backpack during a year's travel. It's all grubby and tough, rambling along with McGinnis as he trudges and airlifts back and forth across Alaska. The style is rough, unfluent, and unpolished, with sentence fragments and single words often strung together or chopped up in an outdoorsy gruffness that is quite suitable for the ramshackle and breathtaking world McGinnis explores, though too often it sounds like plain old bad writing. But throughout...