Book name: Greenlights
Book author name: By Matthew McConaughey,
Publisher: Headline
Price: Rs 799
This book is about the life and times of a small-town, white American part-poet, part-philosopher, who is currently having a phenomenal run as an actor in Hollywood. Matthew McConaughey was born of working-class parents who divorced twice only to marry each other thrice. How’s that for a beginning? Anyway. The father, in particular, was a maverick: for one thing, he was given to walloping his three boys every now and then, not always without a touch of affection. This was the only way he knew to make men out of boys. There seems to have been something remarkable about almost anything he did, including the way he left this world — whilst making torrid love to his wife. McConaughey’s autobiography of sorts, complete with pages of many colours — green, grey, black and, of course, white — is both a dream and a terror.
Going by the trajectory of his travels at home and in the world — journeys not always in the physical sense — here is someone who could well provide a forceful rebuttal to the popular impression of the ‘Ugly American.’ On the worldly plane, he has won an Oscar, repeatedly refused to take up lucrative film offers for want of likeable scripts, and fathered two kids from an angelic companion, adding one more after having married her and settled down more securely.
About the book, its author writes: “I’ve been in this life for fifty years, trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud.”
Dreams populate the man’s sleep like nobody’s business; occasionally, the remembered images are a delicious mix of the real and the metaphysical. In one of his “wet dreams”, he sees himself floating on the Amazon, surrounded by anacondas, piranhas and the like but, strangely, those watching him from the banks of the river are African tribesmen. No sooner has he dreamt it, he takes off for Latin America not so much to experience the vastness of the river as to climb the steps of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. A restless traveller, he leaves for Africa soon after the Latin trip. He seeks fulfilment rather than adventure as he pits his wrestling skills with a rural champion in the interior of Mali. But the tic in his soul appears to come to rest only after he has met the woman of his destiny and the attainment of fatherhood.
About the time I was reading Greenlights, one of the ugliest Americans in recent history was holding forth on the virtues of practically everything that the author of the book seems to abhor. At a time when the world’s most powerful political leader was behaving as if he was hell-bent on destroying his country, cheered on by massive crowds of delirious supporters, came along a fellow-American of wit, intelligence, and great compassion for one and all as if to underline the difference between the profound and the populist. By means of this funny, fun-filled read which can, however, also be worryingly wise and potentially dangerous, the actor-author is perhaps telling us that a better life is possible for even the worst-off if only we would give a chance to the ‘Greenlights’ to come on, “realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green, too”.
The moral urgency that informs the book through its duration is, in a sense, the antithesis of all that the traditional subculture of Hollywood seeks to glorify. It’s difficult to escape the feeling that Matthew M. is a grand and wholesome exemplar of the ‘enemy within’.