The New York Times has posted a review of The Journals of Spalding Gray by Nell Casey. The review, written by Ron Rosenbaum, aptly analyzes Casey’s book and tenderly delivers Rosenbaum’s own thumbnail rendering of Gray’s life and work as a monologuist/actor. Some quotes are below, the full review is here:
“And then he [Gray] plunges into downtown avant-garde New York culture and partakes of what might be called salad-bar Buddhism, a little from here, a little from there, which doesn’t seem to supply much comfort. The confessional impulse is Catholic, the ineradicable guilt sounds Jewish, the stew he makes from them all his own.
“Nonetheless he becomes one of America’s great talkers and theatrical raconteurs. Mark Twain, Oscar Levant, Jean Shepherd, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Pryor are his peers. He made holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless, yet his journals reveal how much he rehearsed and revised, how dedicated to acting as much as spontaneity he was — to acting as if it were all spontaneous. The persona he created became beloved — almost too beloved, in a way that sometimes trivialized him into a Seinfeldian curmudgeon — and he jetted all over the world replicating it…”
“In its own way his monologue [Swimming to Cambodia] is as full of awe and tact, and illuminating about the way we fear to face the full extent of the horror because any response is inadequate. As one of the few responses of art to one of the dismally unusual genocides of the bloody century — auto-genocide: a people who slaughtered their own, not another, people — at the very least it serves as a critique of our superficiality. Gray’s work deserves to last and perhaps in his final dive off the Staten Island Ferry, he was, in his own way, finally bridging that divide, swimming to Cambodia.”
– Ron Rosenbaum, Books of The Times: ‘The Journals of Spalding Gray’ by Nell Casey
