Unstrung Heroes

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Summary: What a story! What a great reading!
Review: John Turturro is a sensational reader. His acting transcended Richard LaGravenese's screenplay, which was vastly inferior to Frank Lidz's book. If only the filmmakers had stuck to the text instead of watering it down and turning it into soap opera! Turturro shows you how rich and poignant the material really is. Can't wait for a sequel.

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Summary: Subtle and Unforgettable
Review: Lidz's narrative is small and focused, but resonates far into the night. Each scene is brilliantly lit, and has a characteristically strange fascination as Lidz juxtaposes huge and tiny currents. It is, above all, a study of the fragile nobility of the human spirit in the face of the irrational, the terrible and the miraculous.

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Summary: Fresh, evocative, enchanting
Review: Like all great comic writers, Franz Lidz has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. Conveyed with total authenticity and the shock of freshness, Unstrung Heroes is a haunting, deeply felt recreation of a childhood.

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Summary: One of the Most Hilarious & Touching Books of the 90s
Review: Most humorous writing isn't funny when it comes out, let alone years later. The majority of the New Yorker's Algonquin Round Table -- writers such as Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker -- simply aren't that amusing on second reading. Lidz is different -- simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking -- with no cloying sentiment. Read him and you'll hook up with the greatest humorists of the past (Updike and Roth are great Lidz fans).

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Summary: A triumph of wit, intelligence and compassion
Review: Mr. Lidz has created a mad, eerie, almost Gothic modern world that still seems to have a reason and to make a sense of its own. Above all the truly comic moments in this unforgettable memoir, there are the transcending elements of passion and profundity on the subjects of death and love beautifully articulated in dramatic action.

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Summary: Very Funny and Inexpressibly Sad
Review: Mr. Lidz's wit stings like a mosquito. He has a swift, clear, gently ironic style, and tells his story not as an act of judgement but as a searching inquiry into madness.

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Summary: One of the five funniest memoirs ever written.
Review: One of the five funniest memoirs ever written, and one of the ten saddest.

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Summary: A truly funny book that will break your heart
Review: Part Woody Allen, part Tobias Wolff, Unstrung Heoes celebrates the weird, uproarious relatives that most families pack away in their closets, like old sweaters. I loved it so much, I reread it twice.

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Summary: PUBCOMMENTS & EXCERPT
Review: PUBCOMMENTS: Franz Lidz is a Sports Illustrated senior writer and New York Times film essayist who, inspired by the advice of Ezra Pound scholar Hugh Kenner ("You have an obligation to visit the great men of your time"), once made a pilgrimmage to Gore Vidal's home in Ravello, Italy, inveigling his way in with the line: "I'm on a world tour of the homes of everyone I've ever seen on The Merv Griffin Show"; who once appeared on David Letterman's show with his pet parrots Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Falbo, unsettling the host with the observation: "Peter speaks 16 bird dialects, including loon. He's learning Waring Blender, but I can't let him get too close to ours. He thinks it's a Jacuzzi"; who was a theater major at Antioch College, touring the East Coast as a singing chain-fetishist biker in the rock musical Suzie Nation and the Yellow Peril; and who became a journalist because a Baltimore Evening Sun feature writer told him, "It's fun to be a reporter. You get to wear a sweater all day.":EXCERPT: From Chapter 4: Uncle Arthur consulted his well-used paperback about dreams. "Butter means an increase in wealth," he intoned. Uncle Arthur collected dreams. A cardboard book at bedside cradled fifteen years' worth, all written down an alphabetized on the backs of bank deposit slips annotated with his whimsical interpretations. "If I dream about shoelaces," he said, "I file it under F, for foot. I got at least A to Y. I don't know if there's any Zs in there. I had a dream about a zebra, but I got that under animals." "It's important to have documentation," agreed Uncle Danny. "Sidney?" said Uncle Arthur. "It's a poem my dad wrote about his dad." "Sidney's dad died when he was three?" "'My father died at the age of three, the age applied not to him, but me,'" "Sidney died at the age of three?" "No, his father." "His father was three?" "No, my father was. His father was older." "So was my father." "It's the same father.":

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Summary: New York Times Review of Unstrung Heroes (3-5-91)
Review: Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, New York Times, March 5, 1991 The title of Franz Lidz's unusual and affecting memoir, "Unstrung Heroes," refers to five "crazy brothers" who grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. "Four turned into my uncles," the author writes. "One became my father." These uncles are not just four unforgettable characters. When Mr. Lidz writes "crazy," he means crazy. Two of them were actually hospitalized: the oldest, Leo, who "was a belles lettrist of great erudition, a Joycean of Ulyssean fussiness and a mental patient of Poundian duration," and Harry, who believed himself to be the retired undefeated boxing champion of nine amateur divisions from featherweight to light heavyweight. As for the two other uncles, Danny and Arthur: they live together in an apartment in the Bronx "in a sort of muttering disharmony," Arthur an inexhaustible collector of shoelaces and other junk, Danny a full-blown paranoid. In an early scene in "Unstrung Heroes," Mr. Lidz describes how for his eighth birthday, he and his sister Sandy went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium with the two uncles and then slept over at their apartment. When a foul ball hit by Mickey Mantle landed near them, Danny became hysterical, convinced that Mantle and Casey Stengel were planning a pogrom. During the night the author and his sister became so frightened by the surrealistic apartment and the old men's daffy behavior that they even turned to each other for comfort. "Have a butter dream," Uncle Danny suggested to the author at bedtime. "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life's a butter dream." Why did the author love these uncles enough to write a memoir about them, subtitled with hollow cheeriness "My Improbable Life with Four Impossible Uncles?" Because things were not that much saner at home, for one thing. The fifth brother, Sidney, though married and a successful inventor, was if anything too much in love with reason. An admirer of B. F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist, he invented an alarm that aroused the entire household the next time his son, the author, wet his bed. "Years later," the Mr. Lidz writes, "I told my father of the absolute terror and self-loathing I had felt. He laughed. 'You never wet your bed again, did you?' " This was an extraordinarily direct communication for Sidney. Usually, he would deliver a scientific lecture in response to his son's attempts to reach him. Or fend him off with puns: "'Who's Spinoza?' I asked. "'The seventeenth-century Dutch metaphysician,' he replied. "'What's a metaphysician?' "'I never metaphysician who didn't overcharge.'" By comparison, the uncles didn't seem so crazy. And then, shadowing the author's childhood, was his mother's declining health owing to cancer. One of the memoir's most bizarrely moving scenes lovingly describes a snowy funeral at which Uncle Danny intones the Kaddish. After a page of description during which the reader is convinced that the author's mother has died, Mr. Lidz announces, "We had buried my pet moth, Cecrops." And then at the end of the chapter, he writes, "The next time we went to a cemetery, we buried my mother." In the general scheme of things, the uncles seem less and less bizarre. How did the author survive all the craziness around him? This is what "Unstrung Heroes" is really about. Despite their nuttiness, the uncles had a certain wisdom to impart. And to a child who was being brought up to believe that language was both a dagger and a shield, they often conveyed that wisdom with considerable wit. Mr. Lidz recalls that during the 1950's, "when McCarthy and lobotomies were in vogue," Uncle Leo wrote to Sidney, "I will not have my subconscious cut to fit the current fashion," echoing Lillian Hellman's famous letter to the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And between the crazy lines, the uncles always conveyed their love for their nephew. Eventually his world truly fell apart. After his mother died, his father, unable to cope, remarried, choosing a woman named Shirley with three children of her own and not the slightest interest in the author. His only friend was a neighborhood bad boy named Ash, whose father had shot himself when Ash was 6, and whose own cruel form of madness made the uncles seem benign by comparison. "Looking back now," Mr. Lidz writes, "I suppose there came a moment a moment when I adopted Uncle Harry's style of evasion, which was to ignore reality if it became too painful. This worked for me when we moved in with Shirley: The most effective way to irritate her was to ignore her. It came to me sometime during my 16th year that my uncles' goofy, misdirectional approach to life was the direct opposite of Shirley's corseted suburbanism." So he became "uncle-ized" and changed his name from Stephen to Franz: Franz Lidz, as Uncle Harry called him, after the composer. The strategy seems to have worked. Mr. Lidz got away, found a woman to love and marry, had two daughters, Gogo and Daisy Daisy, and became the author of quirky articles for Sports Illustrated. "Only Uncle Arthur and Uncle Harry are still alive," he writes, "and they're old now." They came to a birthday party for Gogo. When they left, Gogo said, "I miss Uncle Arthur and Uncle Harry." "Do you want to go with them?" her father asked her. "No, I don't want to go with them. I want to miss them." Which is the way Mr. Lidz always felt -- "their charm increased with their distance" -- and the way he makes us feel in this melancholy, funny book, a loony tune played with touching disharmony on mournful woodwinds and a noisy klaxon.