On the Shelf
Superhero
By Tim Blake Nelson Unnamed Press: 424 pages, $32
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Image 14-year-old Tim Blake Nelson sitting at dinner in Oklahoma, delivering a 25-word e book report on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The project got here from his father; literary dialogue was anticipated to ensue. “I grew up at a dinner table at which frivolous conversation rarely occurred,” Nelson mentioned. “Books were really revered in our home.”
We spoke over Zoom about Nelson’s notably literary childhood whereas he was at a movie competition in Poland. His second novel, “Superhero,” hits cabinets this winter. It’s a delicate Hollywood satire — and any resemblance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, you already know, coincidental.
As an actor, Nelson broke via in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” co-starring with George Clooney and John Turturro. Together with his hangdog face and genuine Oklahoma twang, he might need spent the final 25 years taking part in dim-witted yokels. However he’s carved out an expansive and diversified profession as an actor, shifting between blockbusters, indie movie units and the MCU.
Tim Blake Nelson has greater than 100 display screen performing credit, together with the Coen Brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” for which he realized the guitar from his son.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Occasions)
“Superhero” riffs on these experiences, with the main points obscured by what Nelson referred to as “a lot of smudging.” This kaleidoscope of a novel follows a number of characters attempting to make a franchise movie for a comics-based studio — the star, his producer spouse, the director, the cinematographer and extra. Every has a wealthy previous desirous to create artwork, a craving that finally comes into battle with the venture of creating a $160-million film.
Take, for example, the director of images, a personality named Javier Benavidez. As an adolescent, he learns concerning the course of of sunshine and shadow remodeling into photographic photos, described in vivid element. “That chapter used to be twice as long,” Nelson mentioned. “Photography has been a lifelong passion of mine, and it was absolutely unbridled pleasure being able to write about the process of putting images on film.” Benavidez’s inventive abilities are what the studio desires for the movie — inside limits.
There’s an apparent pleasure in portraying Hollywood all through the novel. Nelson invents a studio, Sparta Comics, and the franchise character, Main Machina, giving every a full backstory. The eye to element extends into how the character was developed post-World Struggle II and the way they’re updating it to the current day.
“It was certainly my intention, to use a world I know really, really well, to examine bigger issues in American culture,” Nelson mentioned. “So you’ve got on the surface level, the big question of why did these movies come out of America? Why did comic books come out of America? And why did they capture the imagination of not only America, but the entire world for well over a decade?” Or, he urged, even longer. “And is that a good thing?” Characters within the novel grapple with all these questions.
At its middle is the star, Peter Compton, a larger-than-life real film star, a Sexiest Man Alive-type who has had a public reckoning along with his habit and restoration. Aided by his spouse, he’s reached an excellent place: “The more time he spent with her, the better his life got, as if the trust of such a cohesively decent soul engendered success in anyone closely associated, particularly as pertained to business opportunities,” Nelson writes. The novel is stuffed with these understated, wry contradictions — an honest soul with a present for making good offers.
Compton is impossibly charming, effortfully erudite, and enjoys the standing that comes along with his stardom. He could make massive calls for, like bringing alongside his non-public chef and upending the manufacturing schedule on the final minute.
One thing like that basically did occur. “There is nothing in the novel that I haven’t either experienced personally or heard from a very reliable source,” Nelson mentioned. Which we are able to take to incorporate the anxious director who brings alongside what he insists shouldn’t be an emotional assist canine, a star saging the set every day and an assistant producer who seems with a luxurious sports activities automotive approach above his pay grade.
“There is nothing in the novel that I haven’t either experienced personally or heard from a very reliable source,” Tim Blake Nelson says.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Occasions)
Nelson is definitely fairly a polymath. First got here images, then got here performing. The primary movie he wrote and directed, “Eye of God” starring Martha Plimpton, was launched in 1997 and tailored from his personal stage play. He’s written and directed indie movies, together with “The Gray Zone” and the forthcoming “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd.” He’s written and carried out in performs, most frequently present in New York. He’s additionally performed loads of TV, maybe most notably in 2019’s “Watchmen.”
Nelson has greater than 100 display screen performing credit, together with two Steven Spielberg movies (“Minority Report,” “Lincoln”) and two Coen Brothers photos, together with their final collaboration, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” for which he realized the guitar from his son.
On condition that historical past, it may be stunning to listen to that Nelson, so properly often known as an actor, thinks novels can reveal issues movie can’t. “Pictures cannot take you into what a character is thinking and feeling. You can infer, but you can’t know in the way that you can in a novel,” he mentioned. “The writer can tell you as close to the truth about what a person is thinking and feeling and seeing as you’re going to get.”
Since he was a baby, Nelson has been a reader, notably dedicated to fiction. “I’ve been reading one novel or another nonstop since I was about 9 or 10 years old,” he mentioned. He simply reels off an inventory of the final dozen books or so he’s learn, together with “Sons and Daughters” by Chaim Grade, “The Oppermanns” by Lion Feuchtwanger and Lawrence Wright’s novel “The Human Scale.” Nevertheless it took him till his 50s to show that avocation right into a vocation (of a modest kind).
He’s printed each his novels with Unnamed Press, an L.A.-based impartial, starting with “City of Blows,” which got here out in 2023. “My agent sent it to Chris Heiser at Unnamed. I really love that house because they’re very small and he’s a really good editor,” Nelson mentioned. It was Heiser who urged reducing among the textual content about images.
“The photography chapter was really fun for me twice as long, but it was going to be a barrier to entry, because that’s early in the novel. I had to be more selective than I wanted to be, just by virtue of trying to make the thing work better,” Nelson admitted. Then he added, “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Ezra Pound’s edit of ‘The Waste Land,’ and he cut three quarters of it.” It’s the facsimile version of T.S. Eliot’s authentic draft with Pound’s handwritten edits. “You can see where Pound went through, you know, one antisemite to another, and made one of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century.” It’s a literary reference that may make his dad and mom proud.
