Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael

by Francis Davis

Da Capo Press, 128 pp., $18 As I was watching Stockard Channing pick up those double Emmys the other night during the televised broadcast, I was struck by the desire to telephone Pauline Kael, the former New Yorker film critic whose reputation and influence certainly needs no introduction. I had been fortunate enough to meet and spend some time with Kael during the last couple years of her life, and my brain is still scrambling to remember every single detail of those conversations. The West Wing had just finished its first TV season, and I remember Kael talking about how much she liked the show. But it wasn’t until I read Francis Davis’ new book Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael that I was reminded of Kael’s immense enthusiasm for Channing. “I only wish she was in it [The West Wing] more,” Davis quotes Kael as saying. Kael made similar comments to me, which is one of the many familiar echoes that make me recognize that Davis’ collection of transcribed conversations with the retired critic brims with accuracy and authenticity. Davis, a jazz critic and contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, interviewed Kael for eventual radio broadcast in July 2000 at her home in Great Barrington, Mass., 14 months before her death. Their conversations cover a range of topics, from television to life at The New Yorker to political correctness and so on. Kael’s acerbic insights on a variety of topics come through here in this informal setting just as clearly and entertainingly as they did in her published reviews. Afterglow is a slim volume, 128 pages in all, and nearly one-fifth of it the author’s introduction, in which Davis invites the readers to consider the book as a “keepsake of a remarkable literary career.” Slight when regarded as a contribution to the critical dialogue, Afterglow is more like a little jewel box — or keepsake — that plays another chorus of Pauline’s passionate song until the covers are closed once more. Nonfiction

This article appears in October 11 • 2002.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.