Mischa Berlinski’s first two books were richly inventive affairs, yet within their fictionality could be discerned the impress of facts — sights seen, stories acquired, local color absorbed. Fieldwork, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, was narrated by an American reporter named Mischa Berlinski, who drew on his creator’s time working in Thailand and researching a hill tribe. The narrator of Peacekeeping (2016), about United Nations employees in Haiti, was a nameless novelist not dissimilar to Berlinski, who lived in the country for some years with his U.N. lawyer wife.
Berlinski now lives in Istanbul, but he was born in New York, and it is there that he set his latest novel. By rights, then, his new book Mona Acts Out should center on a Berlinski-esque protagonist and come crammed with transmuted personal experiences of the author’s early life in the Big Apple. However, this time around, Berlinski appears to have made a concerted effort to cover his tracks and blur biographical outlines. His lead character is female, a celebrated Shakespearean actress whose newest meaty drama plays out not onstage but off. As she makes her way through the city, grappling with current concerns while on a collision course with her past, Berlinski brilliantly lays bare her hopes, fears, desires, and artistry.
We first encounter Mona Zahid waking up on Thanksgiving Day in her Morningside Heights apartment. She is unable to get out of bed — “the day already feeling like defeat” — or eliminate her nagging self-doubts about the state of her life. She is still mourning the death of her younger sister, Zahra. Her teenage son, Aaran, is growing up too fast. Her in-laws have come up from Florida to stay, which means tolerating Bruce’s latest crazy arguments on the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare (“the great fraud”) and enduring Sheila’s baffling stories involving acrimonious comments traded at her book club — “slights and insults so subtle as to be inexplicable outside the context of the prison yard or the court at Versailles.”
Mona is also weighed down by her rocky marriage. When she and her doctor husband Phil aren’t fighting, they are harboring “deep icebergs of discontent.” One typical source of tension is Mona’s lack of interest in getting to know or spend time with Phil’s social clique, the Chums.
“I just don’t get it,” he complains, “how a woman who has three roles in repertory can’t even remember my friends’ names.”
Compounding all of this is Mona’s dissatisfaction with her current performance in a production of Twelfth Night and her mounting anxiety about playing Cleopatra in her next project. Taking on the role has unleashed worries relating to acting (can she successfully convey the many complexities of the Egyptian queen?) but also aging: after portraying an array of Shakespeare’s heroines over the years, she is now “coming to the end of the line of his great women” and entering a new, late stage in her career.
To get through this Thanksgiving Day and be “positively soused with happiness,” Mona pops two painkillers and then vapes marijuana. However, family members start to quarrel, shattering her medicated calm. When the pressure gets too much, she tells everyone she forgot to buy parsley and makes her escape with Barney, the dog.
Mona’s simple errand turns into a trip across the city to see the man who gave her her big break. Milton Katz, the founder and director of an East Village theater troupe, is dying. He is also disgraced following accusations of sexual misconduct from his actresses and from Mona’s student niece. Mona has always stood by Milton, acknowledging her debt to him and accepting his touchy-feely approach and many quirks, compulsions, and unorthodox methods. Now, she plans to support him again. However, getting to his Brooklyn brownstone entails a long day’s journey into night and frequent detours down memory lane.
Mona Acts Out begins conventionally enough with sketches of family strife. Once its leading lady steps outside and turns her back on, it develops into a more varied and rewarding tragicomedy, one whose patchwork narrative comprises madcap adventures, captivating character studies, and immersive and discursive backstories.
Berlinski charts Mona’s movements as she wanders the streets and eventually gatecrashes the Thanksgiving party of a long-lost friend and former actress, Vanessa. However, it is Mona’s thoughts, not her actions, that prove more interesting. She composes a eulogy to Milton in her head, which in turn prompts her to look back on her acting life: her audition to join his “guerilla Shakespeare company,” the Disorder’d Rabble, the roles she played, the productions she appeared in, the casts she was a part of. Later, photographs in Vanessa’s apartment trigger Proustian remembrances of a show that was almost derailed by an intense love affair and the fury of a woman scorned.
The novel acquires heft when Mona contemplates the allegations made against Milton. Vanessa, one of his accusers, brands him a predator.
“So are lions,” Mona counters. “If you go around taming the wild Miltons of this world, you’ll end up in a very tame world — and I’m not sure that’s the world I want to live in.”
Berlinski resists serving up neat answers or value judgments. Instead, he outlines the charges and his protagonist’s responses to them and lets his reader sift the evidence to decide if Milton has been wronged or Mona is deluded.
Offsetting these moral quandaries are numerous light touches. Berlinski employs playful imagery: “Her head was pounding something miserable now, the hangover swinging from the monkey bars of her soul.” Mona has a witty, flirty encounter with an “ex-something” she assumed was dead and recalls a bleakly humorous exchange with Phil about their beleaguered status as husband and wife. “It’s boring to be married,” she tells him. “Of course it is,” he replies. “That’s the point of it.” And among the scattered Shakespeare excerpts and analyses are comic comparisons: Monika likens freezing and defrosting leftover meals with the ending of The Winter’s Tale when the statue of Hermione comes back to life, and muses on the extent to which two characters from Measure for Measure resemble Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Some episodes amount to much ado about nothing. In the main, though, this is a compelling tale about a fascinating woman finding her way and her place in both the acting world and real life.
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Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
