The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel, by Eric Idle; Pantheon, $24
By Emily Gordon
Consider the question: What makes Monty Python so funny? Before you run for cover, fearing bands of TV-mad academics and 12-year- olds with the complete script of “Dead Parrot” at the ready, ponder this analysis: “Five limeys and a Yank. No girls; they did drag. Typical Brits. They’re never happier than when dressing up as women. . . . It’s all very silly nonsense. They seem dangerously cuckoo to me.”
This dismissal – written by the fictional Professor William Reynolds at the end of the 25th century – is the work of master Python Eric Idle. His new novel, The Road to Mars, brings the philosophy of humor into the future – which, in Idle’s vision, is populated by almost-human robots, divas with an intergalactic audience that puts Murdoch and Turner to shame, cruiselike spaceships with enough live entertainment to last a light-year and your garden- variety stand-up comics.
The philosophy part of it all is the preoccupation of Professor Reynolds, who’s actually narrating a story that takes place 80 years earlier, in the late 2300s. Way back then, a robot named Carlton puts a lot of work into a dissertation on what makes humans laugh. He calls it De Rerum Comoedia: A Discourse on Humor, and by the time he’s done, he feels (or thinks, anyway) that he’s hit upon the Unified Theory of Everything.
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This fascinates Carlton because of whose droid he is: two comedians, Alex Muscroft (the short, manic one) and Lewis Ashby (the tall, laconic one). In fact, Carlton concludes excitedly, if his calculations and deductions about comedy are right, “Now they might not even have to do it anymore.” But Reynolds, having discovered this treatise in some abandoned university files, has a nefarious plan to use Carlton’s conclusions for his own fame (and to win back his fickle girlfriend).
The bulk of the novel, though, concerns the adventures of Muscroft and Ashby, as they’re known on the circuit, and their run-ins with a host of sci-fi personalities: the villainous ship’s captain, the beautiful woman with a habit of flirting with men and then planting explosive cybermines on the premises, the mysterious old man from a renegade planet and, of course, the ubiquitous diva whose ego and sense of hubris could easily eclipse the sun.
Stuff blows up; people pop into History Bars, where the 20th century is undergoing a kitschy revival; wisecracks abound, and all the while, Carlton, “tintellectual” extraordinaire, is trying to make sense of it even though, as his Oz counterpart lacked a heart, he’s minus a funny bone. All of this is, as the hapless Professor Reynolds would say, very silly nonsense. But like everyone with a shipshape sense of humor, Idle knows not to take himself too seriously. The Road to Mars has the quality of the gently nutty Python sketches – the proper newscaster oblivious to the tide coming in, the broad satire of the courtroom scenes, the surreal animation – rather than the pure brilliant rage of a John Cleese explosion.
But if there were only one way to make humans laugh, the world would be a very dismal place indeed. Eric Idle makes sure it isn’t.
Chicago Sun-Times, September 9, 1999 (originally published in Newsday)

Identity switching is the name of clever game in `Dropping’
By Emily Gordon
Newsday
Thursday, July 20, 2000
Name Dropping. By Jane Heller. St. Martin’s. 327 pages. $24.95.
If you’ve ever cyberstalked yourself, you know how unsettling it can be to discover all the people who share your name. Such is the sticky situation involving the heroine of Jane Heller’s “Name Dropping,” a Regular Gal in New York City who discovers that right in her building there is an Un-Regular Gal with, you guessed it, the same name.
Nancy Stern, Ms. Ordinary, is a divorced, 30-something teacher who tends overprivileged, underloved children at the Small Blessings nursery school; she spends her days “convincing four-year-olds that nose-picking, while not an inherently bad thing, is nevertheless a poor choice when socializing with others.” She and her best friend, fellow teacher Janice, fret about singlehood and surf the Web together. She lives in 6J.
The other Nancy Stern, by contrast, is a veritable Holly Golightly, juggling lovers, freshly dry-cleaned furs and invitations to the U.N., private screenings with Harrison Ford and the like. She is a freelance writer, which as we all know is a very glamorous job. She lives in the penthouse — 24A. Understandably, their mail keeps getting mixed up, and soon enough Ms. Ordinary is trotting up to 24J with stuff for Ms. Fancypants (a dozen roses from “Jacques,” $10,000 Visa bills, personal notes from Kevin Costner, Prozac). Our Nancy is at first irritated, then increasingly fascinated with her neighbor’s glamorous life.
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The interest isn’t returned. Freelancer Nancy, resplendent in white cashmere and leather gloves, is quite a sourpatch: She says condescending things to her namesake, such as “You’re quite the competent little message taker. . . . How’d you like to be my executive secretary for a living instead of baby-sitting people’s brats?” How rude!
But soon Ms. Fancypants is more than rude — she’s dead. As police scour the building for clues to the brutal killing, “the lesser of the two Nancy Sterns” is riddled with confusion and worry. She didn’t just fantasize about the other Nancy’s existence; she actually wriggled herself into it, by accepting a blind date from a man who’d called for the Nancy in 24A.
The man, Bill Harris, turns out to be a serious catch: He’s tall, sexy, works as a manager at a high-class jewelry store, loves his two kids and concedes that “men can be louses.” But the more attached they become, the more our Nancy realizes the sham is unfair to Bill, who’s from a family of cops and treasures honesty above all else. She ends the romance, leaving both of them heartbroken. Then Upstairs Nancy gets bumped off, and our Nancy freaks out: Once Bill reads the newspapers, he’ll know what a weirdo she is, and hate her even more.
That doesn’t happen, though. I won’t reveal any more of the ensuing hair-raising plot, except that it involves jewel scams, steamy scenes, Home Depot, a Latvian nanny, pirates, a detective named Burt Reynolds and sly digs at author Sue Grafton.
Florida resident Heller makes some funny big-city gaffes and her style veers from spirited and clever to overly familiar. But “Name Dropping” is a tasty snack you’ll gobble up.
(This story was originally published in a somewhat different form.)

Celebrating du Maurier’s ornery genius
By Emily Gordon
Sunday, February 6, 2000
Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress. By Nina Auerbach. University of Pennsylvania Press. 180 pages. $24.95.
The very name of Daphne du Maurier brings with it a gothic tremble, a pungent, unsettling perfume. It calls up a world at once lofty and macabre — not unlike Manderley, the gorgeous trap of a mansion in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” the 1940 film adapted from the novelist’s best-known book.
But du Maurier, who died in 1989, was no Lady Novelist, fastidious, proper and accommodating. Rather, as scholar Nina Auerbach makes admirably clear in a new study of du Maurier’s life and career, she was an upper-crust, ornery, sexually ambiguous snob who also wrote superb fiction.
The cruel joke, as Auerbach argues, is that the only works that are even vaguely familiar to modern readers — “Rebecca,” “My Cousin Rachel” and other female-centered novels and stories — are also her least compelling.
Indeed, as Auerbach goes on to demonstrate, du Maurier wrote her best fiction about powerful men.
“Throughout Daphne du Maurier’s novels,” Auerbach writes, “the falls of men are more compelling than those of women because her men have everything to lose while women are humbled by definition.”
Thus, now-forgotten novels like “Hungry Hill” and “The Scapegoat” are miles better than, say, “Rebecca,” with its spooked, wilting narrator and dead heroine.
Furthermore, du Maurier the person was considerably more complex and self-contradictory than many readers have assumed.
Though a relentless and unsentimental family historian, her own autobiographical works are notably devoid of modern memoirs’ seamy detail — a restraint Auerbach admires. Still, there are a few juicy bits in “Haunted Heiress,” including du Maurier’s affairs with Ellen Doubleday (her publisher’s wife) and actress Gertrude Lawrence.
What Auerbach does disclose of her subject’s character doesn’t always inspire admiration. But she never feels the need to conceal her ambivalence about, in her unapologetic description, this “strange writer and unlikable woman.”
She loathes du Maurier’s crypto-fascist politics, and lets us know it; the novelist’s preferential treatment of the men in both her life and her books makes Auerbach itchy.
Yet in her open intelligence about the inevitable conflicts that a strong personality will produce in both scholar and devotee, Auerbach somehow ends up making the reader more sympathetic to her celebration of du Maurier’s decidedly ungothic realism, and ultimately more interested in reading du Maurier.
“I like surprises in my life, in my friends, and in the narrators of novels I read,” she writes with characteristic candor. “I gravitate to evasion of categories and, in fiction and life, escape from plot conventions.”
It’s clear, then, that “The Haunted Heiress” is not a conventional biography, nor a traditional academic monograph.
Throughout, there are informal asides and second-guessings that would never appear in a more standard academic text.
This relatively loose structure allows for the inclusion of odd, provocative connections: between, say, the metaphoric connections between du Maurier’s grandfather’s trade as a glass-blower, the fragile Glasses of Salinger fame and “The Glass Menagerie.” There is also an engaging chapter devoted solely to describing and critiquing the numerous films made of du Maurier’s books and stories (including, of course, “The Birds”).
Auerbach employs plenty of traditional, albeit cranky, literary criticism here along with the psychoanalytic speculation and ’50s flashbacks.
Without descending into jargon, she roots out the themes — including the “doubleness and self-fabrication” that plagued the du Maurier family; ghosts and potent ancestors; shades of incest; boyish girls and Peter Pans; tragic epigones and so on — that recur throughout du Maurier’s work.
And so, at long last, Auerbach banishes the malign image of Daphne du Maurier, Romance Novelist.
“Romance is inherently a soothing and tender genre that aims to reconcile women to traditional lives whose common denominator is home,” she writes, within a description of some particularly bitter denouements. “I find it odd and ironic that such brutal depictions of emptiness should be given the label `romance.’ ”
In the end, Auerbach manages to make the now-standard rescue of an unjustly pigeonholed woman writer newly outrageous and winsomely fresh. To paraphrase “Rebecca’s” wan narrator, we can never go back to du Maurier again — at least not the du Maurier we thought we knew. Thank God for that.
(Originally published in Newsday; reprinted in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)