Review by New York Times Review
IN "A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN," Virginia Woolf considers the difficulties facing the unhistoried, culturally marginalized woman writer: "Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. . . . Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses." If women's literature were to have a future, she continues, there is a "great part which must be played in that future. . . by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be." Judged by its title, Sarah Ruhl's book might seem the very embodiment of Woolf's prophesy, though its defensive flippancy, nearly a century later, might have surprised her. For a woman who confesses to a moral loathing of the word "quirky," Ruhl comes alarmingly close, at first glance, to appearing just that: Does a successful female playwright ("In the Next Room; Or, The Vibrator Play," "The Clean House") and intellectual, offering a collection of her pensées in 2014, really still feel the need to reassure the public of her cute, harassed harmlessness? When the likes of Adam Phillips bestow their fragments on the world, it is with all due self-importance, and while Ruhl's title is mindfully unpompous, it also asserts - though somewhat apologetically - a connection to living too vigorous for a pristine set of cleaned-up, embalmed reflections. That note of apology, thankfully, does not persist. "If one is interested in longevity as a writer," she asks, "how does one respond to the cultural obsession with newness? Or to the sinking and perhaps paranoid feeling that women writers in particular, as soon as they are no longer perceived as potentially seducible daughters but instead as repulsive, dry menopausal mothers in need of lubrication - wait, Virginia Woolf said that Charlotte Brontë wrote badly when she was angry." "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write" is in fact a work of profound moral organization: It arises from the Woolfian notion of a feminine form, sure enough, but its deeper purpose is to define the artist's relationship to truth and to demonstrate how, from within the correctness of the artistic process, life can be meaningfully understood. In these short (and sometimes very short - one of them consists of a single word) essays, Ruhl anatomizes the central drama of creativity, whereby the self and the business of living are found to contain the moral structure of everything that lies outside it. The question of gender quickly becomes germane: How can a woman writer, a mother of three children and embroiled in the domesticity that comes with them, be expected to believe that her condition of life, far from marginalizing her, is in fact bringing her closer to ultimate forms of knowledge? It is a question not just of interruptions but of that other Woolfian theme, cultural notions of importance. "There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me," Ruhl writes in her first essay, "On Interruptions." "And finally I came to the thought, all right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow." The "other self" was Ruhl's identity as a writer, which she had been trying to cosset and protect from invasion; yet this moment of surrender, crucially, gives her back her artistic authority. "I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life." What follows is a set of observations whose most noticeable characteristic is the freedom of association. Having been left with no choice but to interrogate culture from an autobiographical position, Ruhl discovers there a far greater intellectual liberty. The 100 essays represent 100 different links between art and reality, as Ruhl's meditations on writing and staging plays find reflection in her experience of family life, friendship, illness and ordinariness. In such essays as "Can One Stage Privacy?" and "The Decline of Big Families and the Decline of Cast Sizes," Ruhl uses her experience as a playwright to make us think anew about what we half-consciously know; elsewhere it is by intimate personal disclosure that a place of greater moral objectivity is reached, where she enables us to look in a more powerful way at how we live now. "I like to look at people's faces when they are waiting," she writes. "Things we used to wait for: the news, mercury in a thermometer to rise, letters from overseas, boats to come in from whaling expeditions, the fifth act, the fifth course, a turkey to roast in the oven, a pig to roast on a spit, the phone to ring, a tape to rewind. . . . And if waiting is lost, then will all the unconscious processes that take place during waiting get lost? And then might we see the death of the unconscious and the death of culture?" Ruhl has found the time to ask the right questions; it's up to us to make time to think about her - and our - answers. 'There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me.' RACHEL CUSK'S latest novel, "Outline," will be published in January.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Noted playwright Ruhl worried that life, read children, might intrude on her career as a writer. But when she put keystroke to computer screen (twenty-first-century talk for pen to paper), she realized that without children and all of life, there is no writing. Her droll musings begin with those thoughts, plus a random 7 added by her two-year-old son. Is this a collaborative effort then? Not directly. After essay number one, Ruhl manages to keep the littler typists at bay as she waxes philosophical on a crazy array of topics, per the book's title. Each is either directly or tangentially related to the theater, specifically American theater, from writing to staging, acting, and watching. The pieces are of the on-the-run sort, most no more than a couple of pages in length, but no less entertaining for it. All readers, including theater buffs, will appreciate a behind-the-scenes vision of a harried Ruhl, shoeless toddler under one arm, tiny sneakers dangling by shoelaces from her teeth, stubbornly typing these pithy, diverting goodies with the other hand.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In these meditations, anecdotes, and stories, award-winning playwright Ruhl (Stage Kiss) hits upon the ideal gimmick for the time-starved author and overburdened reader. Ruhl praises the "beauty of smallness," showing in pithy probes that "small, forthright words... might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work." As in her plays, her wide-ranging subjects-some treated in no more than a paragraph, line, or single word-tend to be the subversive. She rallies her readers to "fight the mania for clarity and help create a mania for beauty instead." Parenting scenes provide the book's tenderest moments, while discussions of playwriting and theater offer valuable instruction on craft. The two themes converge not just in their similarities-"both parenting and theater involve an embrace of impermanence, and both are embodied art forms"-but also in Ruhl's belief that theater, playing to the childlike love of illusion, can deliver pure joy. In bold, incisive strokes, she advocates for the creation of art that captures the "humor and the desperation of life," and for the observation that the tiniest details, in the hope that smallness can "wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level... in order to banish the goliath of loneliness." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An acclaimed playwright reflects on her art and craft.MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer nominee Ruhl (Drama/Yale Univ.) is a busy mother of three whose work is often interrupted by her childrens needsfor food, say, or a fake knife to cutfake fruit. Instead of writing something totalizing, something grand, she has collected some thoughts on theater: writing plays, acting, watching productions and dealing with Other People: Directors, Designers, Dramaturgs, and Children. Though she claims that she knows next to nothing, she notes that theater is not about knowing, or putting forward a thesis, but about making knowledge from the prismatic perspectives of a few characters. Ruhls essays, generally a page or two, sometimes are much briefer. In An essay in praise of smallness, she writes, simply, I admire minimalism. In an essay entitled Is there an objective standard of taste? she responds, No. Several essays consider the power of language. In the world of imaginary things, speech acts are everywhere, she writes. One declares the imaginary world into being. For Ruhl, theater depends on physicality rather than psychological analysis. Future playwrights, she maintains, would do well to study juggling rather than literary theory. Words like liminal and words like unpack should go in essays about theater and get banished from rehearsal rooms, she writes. Actors used to be akin to prostitutes in the public mind. Now we are akin to professors. The author laments the lack of freedom for a playwright to fail, caused in part by subscription audiences who may feel that by subscribing, they have been inoculated against failure and in part by the cost of mounting plays. She also laments the whitewashed stage: Casts are predominantly white, unless a playwright specifically calls for a nonwhite actor in a particular role.Ruhls musings may remind readers of Lydia Davis aphoristic short stories: fresh, piquant and slyly irreverent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
