Morning, Noon and Night

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A portrait of the artist as bemused dad, this account of a day in the life of the Gray family is by turns funny, meditative and self-absorbed. Gray (Swimming to Cambodia, etc.) may say he is "really no good at making up stories," but he is brilliant at telling them. Parents will smile with recognition at his tales of sharing the bath with plastic action figures; of trying to control his anger at the children's rejection of a dinner lovingly prepared by his wife, Kathie, in favor of "Lunchables"; and at the stream of existential questions posed by his son, Forrest ("Dad, how do flies celebrate?"). With the birth of his second son, Theo, Gray's recollection of how he and his brothers treated their own father is sharpened, providing a frame of family history for his present encounters with parenthood. The 18th-century churchyard across from Gray's suburban Long Island home inspires his sometimes morbid imagination, but his frequent flights of fantasy are always brought down to earth by the real demands of young children or the common sense of the apparently endlessly patient Kathie. In his stepdaughter, Marissa, Gray seems to have met his match for self-dramatization: "We both thought that life was a rehearsal for the perfect story and the perfect audience." Gray's own words about a woman who exposes her toeless foot for alms on a New York subway--that her story "was no doubt partly an act, but was a good act and it deserved some money"--could equally be applied to his own work. Agent, ICM. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A day in the life of new dad Gray. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Ben Greenman

As gray says several times, the story of parenthood is the story of falling in love with your own children. On those terms, Morning, Noon, and Night is a successful love story.
—Time Out: New York

Kirkus Reviews

Gray (It's a Slippery Slope, 1997, etc.) is an indefatigable talker. That's how he makes his living. Here he talks some more, a lot more, as he muses his way through one recent day. It's no Bloomsday, this day in the life of Spalding Gray. It starts slowly and works its way up to pedestrian speed. Eventually, though, he gets moving with deep thoughts about love, death, and related matters. The flowing discourse concerns home life in Sag Harbor, New York, with patient Kathie; Marissa, her daughter by an earlier liaison; their young son, Forrest; and baby Theo. There are, naturally, diverse thoughts about family life, its joys and terrors. This domestic field has been plowed before and Gray does as well with it as the next self-absorbed 56-year-old with a fear of sons. There is, to be sure, some humor. He attempts to teach his boy the semiotics of the word "shit," follows with a riff on ATMs and thence to thoughts of bank tellers' underwear. On and on he goes, offering vagrant comments on hand-propelled lawn mowers, his late mother's flatulence, churches, and, perforce, sex. Like a latter-day George M. Cohan, he's not above waving Old Glory, "the most beautiful of all the flags in the world." Sometimes he's an artful old philosopher and sometimes he's Al Bundy. (Kathie calls contractors; her family name is Russo "and I figure that's good, because so many of the contractors are of Italian-American descent.") Gray's shtick is to seem to let it all hang out in an excess of introspection. Sporadically, there is a universal quality. At other times, it's a lot, a surfeit, a plenitude of unilateral conversation. While others may be ready to cry "uncle," his many fans will consider the talk justfine. As a performed monologue, the words are probably charming and strong in the sentiment department. On paper, it's light, light entertainment as Gray disrobes again.