MixedAir MailOne thing I did not expect to find in his memoirs was quite so much talk about penises, and by \'quite so much\' I mean \'any.\' If those are your expectations, they will be gratified often and early ... I don’t know if the American Urological Association picks a Book of the Year, but this should be it. If you are contemplating giving the book to an elderly relative who loves the Merchant Ivory movies for their civilized dignities, think again ... the other great surprise of Solid Ivory is that the four-time-nominated and one-time Oscar-winning filmmaker devotes very little of the book to his films. He has almost no anecdotes or insights about his most celebrated works ... The lack of focus on the films is frustrating not only because Ivory’s work is my principal curiosity about his life, but also because he is a very good writer and I was eager to see what he would say about the material he and Merchant chose, the people he picked to bring the material to life, and the many challenges he must have faced getting such seemingly uncommercial material before the public ... All storytelling momentum is lost. In lieu of that momentum, we get the compensation of Ivory’s lively renderings of, among others, Lillian Ross, Bruce Chatwin, and Susan Sontag; a too short but still interesting view of a late-career George Cukor; a long and engrossing account of Vanessa Redgrave; and, most surprisingly, a razor-sharp but not altogether unsympathetic profile of Raquel Welch ... He writes about Merchant here, too, but it feels curiously impersonal—we have no detailed sense of how Ivory feels for this man whose prodigious energies and charm, not to mention whose deft gift for connivance, kept them in business for five decades. Let’s take the broad view and hope that what Ivory felt for Merchant, who died in 2005, was too big to be reduced to a handful of sentences in a memoir, and that the noble thing was for those emotions to be felt but unsaid.
