There You Go Again

Nor, of course, is the phenomenon unique to writers. This week, with the release of Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson will offer us another elegantly stylized film about youngsters from dysfunctional families being impassively precocious, and Bill Murray being Bill Murray. Philip Glass, who in some ways seems like the most extreme test case in any art form, has been getting by just fine for decades on a very small bag of musical tricks. It would be hard to argue that he?s the kind of artist who goes out on an aesthetic limb, but it would be much harder to argue that he?s not a distinctive and important composer.

There will obviously always be people who keep creating variations of the same basic work to ever-diminishing creative returns. Paul Auster, to take a prominent example, has probably pushed the guy-recovering-from-a-tragedy setup and the novel-within-a-novel device about as far as is artistically profitable. Woody Allen has spent much of the last couple of decades not fixing what he (if not his critics) feels pretty confident ain?t broke. But repetition per se is not necessarily a symptom of being stuck in a rut. He probably won?t, but you get the sense that Vann could keep on writing books in which tragic things happen in cabins without ever exhausting the human possibilities of such an apparently straightening scenario. One artist?s rut, after all, is another?s groove, and Dirt is a fine and unsettling example of the distinction between the two.

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