But there are no raucous rounds of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass the time on this road trip, no macramé-ing of friendship bracelets. And archery, horseback riding and kickball are not on the agenda this weekend.
The main event? Books.
We’re on a readers retreat. This is not to be confused with a writers retreat, where aspiring authors attend instructive workshops and spend chunks of time, alone, working on their manuscripts. Nor is it an authors retreat for published writers to attend panels and network with other authors and publishers.
Not only have men robbed women of their own narratives; they have also appropriated and retold them to benefit their own interests. Essential in reconsidering a foundational Judeo-Christian story, The Book of Eve is doing the fundamental work of reimagining the internal life of a woman who has scarcely been afforded one.
What makes this spy thriller so compelling is its central character. Heather is complex and always interesting — she’s haunted by memories, in particular of her father whom she adored, and of Flavia, the only real friend she ever had.
But what saves this horror-fest from being shoved back onto the bookshelf in despair at the depravity of its two perpetrators of crime is the complexity and humanity of private investigator, Holly Gibney.
You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.
By the turn of the millennium, Miramax was spending big on middlebrow fare like “The Cider House Rules” and “Kate & Leopold,” the kind of stuff the studios made. As Soderbergh laments to Biskind, “The independent film movement, as we knew it, just doesn’t exist anymore.”
Like many Hollywood sagas, Biskind’s turns out to be a trilogy. His latest book, “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV” (William Morrow), explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. Biskind’s turn to television is telling: the movies, he sighs, are stuck in “superhero monoculture.” Soderbergh, who directed the Cinemax series “The Knick,” reappears to complain, “The audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television.” Not network television, mind you—Biskind dismisses it, somewhat ungenerously, as “a measureless tract of hard, cracked soil, inhospitable to intelligent life”—but the other kind, starting with HBO.