Thomas Savage’s novel “The Power of the Dog,” now a major motion picture, asks us where real power lies — in brute force or the brains to overcome it?

'The Power of the Dog': the limited power of an American archetype

December 12, 2021

Like John Ford’s “The Searchers,” the Kirk Douglas movie “Lonely Are the Brave, “Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” Jim Harrison’s :Legends of the Fall” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing,” Thomas Savage’s novel “The Power of the Dog” — now an acclaimed film starring Benedict Cumberbatch — centers on the American archetype of the solitary, unvarnished cowboy, the outsider who remains true to his wild nature even as civilization encroaches upon and eclipses him.

The Empire strikes back: Andy Murray and the Davis Cup

November 29, 2015

Great Britain has won the Davis Cup, defeating Belgium.

More accurately, Andy Murray has won the Davis Cup.

Any Cup championship is, first and foremost, about teamwork, with the country of the winning team getting the honors. Sports are forever entwined in politics as I illustrate in “Water Music,” the first novel in my series, “The Games Men Play.”

But tennis, like swimming, is also among the most individualistic of sports, and the tension between the individual and the team in these sports– another theme of “Water Music” – is part of their flavor. ...

‘Shipping’ news

February 23, 2015

Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...