A writer worth looking into …

… [Reviews] Seven Steps to Heaven, By Wyatt Mason | Harper's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Fosse is often described as the Beckett of the twenty-first century, an accusation that seems unfair to both writers. Yes, Fosse’s first play, Someone Is Going to Come, was a kind of reply to Waiting for Godot, and yes, both Fosse’s and Beckett’s dramas proceed with a kind of scrubbed plainness populated more by voices than by characters in the conventional sense, and Fosse’s novels, like Beckett’s, are driven by a narrowness of focus and a formal rigidity. But Beckett’s metaphysics, Irishly, balances gravity with levity, whereas Fosse’s work—at least according to my hopscotching through the corpus (five novels, five plays, some memoir, stories, and poetry)—seems not overwhelmingly interested in humor. A study of Fosse’s theater mentions the word “comedies” once, “laughed” once, “funny” and “fun” not at all.