An attitude in search of a story, any story, Regina is a frustrating case of an author too much in love with his main character. He uses her to tug at the possibility for hope amid a landscape of harsh desolation. Even if real hope doesn’t exist anywhere, he concludes, at least there is Regina.
Regina Glassman is a moderately famous Manhattan stage actress who has retreated to a life of magazine writing and raising two sons. That is until she is asked to join the cast of a major revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Regina made her name playing the ingenue Nora in an earlier production; she can’t say no to a chance to relive the role.
How young she was when she played teenaged Nora back then! How much more, she knows, can she bring to the part now.
Life is art and vice versa, as Regina imparts to her fellow cast members. She even recalls swooning on stage in one of her earlier performances:
“It wasn’t a feeling of love, so much as the premonition that Nina was about to destroy herself. That was the instant I thought of her as his trophy, his sea gull, the stuffed bird in a case.”
Marshall said, “Everyone who is falling in love has that premonition.”
The noise of car horns came through the doorway. Regina had read somewhere that at a given spot in Manhattan you could hear them blow three or four hundred times in an hour. “What I thought about that curtain: I thought it was the curtain of doom.”
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| Regina settles into a routine of alternately rehearsing and discussing The Seagull with her fellow actors in the lead-up to the play's opening. Then the director decides to open the play weeks early, pushing Regina and the other actors to their breaking point. Image from https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/staged-readings-primer-24103/ |
Let’s get this out of the way early: This is a tough novel to read if you aren’t familiar with Chekhov’s The Seagull going in. The book is constantly referencing the play when not quoting extended passages from it, as if the reader has a well-worn translation at their elbow.
I just read The Seagull, so I had a different kind of problem, one related to a big twist Epstein sets up early and takes his time revealing. Simply put, I was perplexed by the fact Regina, a 40-year-old woman, expects to play Nora despite being twice that character’s age. Regina may look young, but her part, it would seem clear, is Arkadina, the protagonist’s mother. This is indeed the director’s plan, but one he doesn’t explain, not until the cast gathers for a reading and Regina is met by silence when she starts reciting Nora’s lines. Talk about a cold reading!
“I assumed you’d understand,” Andrew the director says. “I didn’t think I had to spell it out.”
This sets up the first major problem for Regina to overcome. She must redirect her energies into a new role, an aging, narcissistic, fundamentally flawed mother figure. Can she make the transition?
About this time, 70 pages in, I began to wonder if this might be how Epstein would make his labored Seagull connection pay off; setting up a situation where Regina confronts her own life issues, namely what seems to be her major case of self-absorption, by channeling those same qualities in the more exaggerated form of cold, foreboding Arkadina.
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| Anton Chekhov poses with the first Arkadina, his future wife Olga Knipper. Regina is reminded that Arkadina is a major part, and that Knipper was still in her 20s the first time she played the part. But acceptance she can no longer be Nora comes slowly. Image from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/20/secrets-lies-and-a-child-william-boyd-on-the-truth-behind-chekhovs-marriage |
Like Arkadina, Regina gives many signs of being a classic narcissist. She ignores her sons, can’t talk about anything other than herself, and worships at the altar of her own past. A product of the Me Generation inching her way toward mortality, Regina suggests a character send-up in the Woody Allen-Saul Bellow mode.
But no. Regina’s self-aggrandizing narrative is not meant to be ironic. As the novel develops, we realize she is a model of goodness and progressive toleration in a world gone mad. How much you can take of this coddled approach dictates whether or not you enjoy reading Regina.
Regina has other problems to deal with, though none carry anything like the same weight as her play. Her estranged husband Davy wants back in her life. Her older son has become secretly religious. A chance meeting with a faith healer challenges Regina’s own settled agnosticism. A killer is on the loose in her apartment building. An epic drought transforms Manhattan and much of the Eastern Seaboard into a powder keg.
Regina also just lost her other job as a feature writer for a magazine. This is a tragedy because she has a lot of opinions to give, whether it be the “stagecraft” in the recent attempted assassination of President Reagan or how the neutron bomb represents capitalism’s greatest triumph, destroying people but preserving property.
The profusion of boom boxes on the streets triggers a rumination about the role of technology dictating young lives, “the reproduction of the sound, its portability, the way it entered your bloodstream.”
At one point, she goes into a rant in the form of a story pitch to her boss, regarding a then-famous commercial where a Black athlete presents his game jersey to a white boy who had given him a soda:
“Yes, the skin of that Steelers’ jersey, which he throws to the boy. It’s a wizard’s cloak! No more conflicts, no more distinctions: black and white, big and little, strong and helpless, experience and innocence, even athlete and spectator – one size fits all. Oneness! Togetherness! And I sit there, I’ve sat there fifty times, and one lobe of my mind is filled with bitter contempt for this lie, this corporate jingle: all one needs to make heaven on earth is a Coke and a smile.”
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| "Hey, Mean Joe, care for a sip of capitalist conformity?" A scene from the vintage commercial that sets Regina raging in one of her many spoken and unspoken rants. Image from https://davidjdeal.medium.com/hey-kid-catch-how-coca-cola-and-mean-joe-greene-launched-a-legend-ab7b9492c84d |
As someone who dearly remembers the early 1980s, I enjoyed the way Epstein brought them back to me, even in the form of complaints. I forgot how esoteric the Left could be in their fault-finding before Trump and climate change came along.
Just as often, Regina contemplates her own past, making observations about how her life is reflected in Chekhov’s observations, or how her former psychologist has the same body posture as Freud’s daughter. All these digressions retard what little forward momentum the novel has.
I often wondered if there was a subtext I was missing, calling out the oddity of Regina’s way of thinking. For example, with all the murders in her apartment building, she not only spends her nights at the theater but still allows one son to sleep on the roof. You think this could be addressed as potential maternal failure. But it just glides by.
Epstein does try to give the story energy, cramming it with incident every few pages. But the problem is always the same: Regina. However much her world gets rocked by some external development, she is always going back in her mind to some great insight she had about Chekhov, or her fear of nuclear holocaust. The woman is exhausting.
The book leaves most of the story points unresolved at the end, a conscious decision it seems. The faith healer is probably a charlatan, the drought continues, but at least her Arkadina is a triumph. Epstein has Regina’s skeptic father sum it up: “Nobody knows all the things there are to know. Lots of things, in my opinion, have got to be a secret.”
So basically, all that angst and incident gets wrapped up with a shrug.
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| Leslie Epstein in 2024. Today he is a creative writing professor at Boston University, where he ran their Creative Writing Program for 36 years. He published his 13th book in 2022. Photo by Sharon Brody from https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/03/23/red-sox-fans-character-leslie-epstein |
Epstein is an author of several well-regarded novels and a member of an even more well-regarded family. His father Philip and uncle Julius wrote the screenplay for Casablanca; his son Theo was general manager of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs when those teams broke long droughts by winning World Championships.
The
fact there is probably more talent in the man’s used Kleenexes than my entire
body makes me hesitant to call Regina a failure. I just can’t call it
anything more than an overextended nod to his enthusiasm for Chekhov and his smothering
embrace for an imagined fellow devotee.
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