UNHEALTHFUL AIR

by Elliott Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 1988

Screenwriter and novelist Baker (A Fine Madness, And We Were Young) relies on his insider's sense of both Hollywood and horse-racing to produce this breezy and improbable fiction about a novelist and screenwriter with an unhealthy love of gambling. Corey Burdick, the wisecracking narrator of this lightweight intrigue, admits to being a ""hack"" screenwriter, who once wrote serious fiction, and who is now down on his luck, barely able to meet the rent. More importantly, he must come up with $640 to pay his bookie, an unsavory character named ""Demetrious."" No sooner does Burdick, who fancies himself a James Garner type, hit up the generous Otto Preminger for the dough than he's accosted by a crazy Oakie, who leaves him bruised and broke, with no clear explanation for the attack. Eventually, he discovers the lunatic lug to be the estranged husband of another Arkansan, this one with visions of stardom she thinks Burdick might make real, what with his current writing project--what she imagines is a screenplay for Preminger. In fact, Burdick's agent, Perry Lutz (""rhymes with klutz""), has finally talked his client into writing for TV, against the latter's alleged principles, a script loosely based on Fitzgerald's ""Pat Hobby"" stories. Of course, in a book full of Hollywood shtick, the TV execs are double-talking idiots, incapable of appreciating Burdick's professed genius. With Bambi Dookes promising love, and her husband, Quentin, threatening death, Burdick finds fortune in a Big Fix: his bookie's elaborate plan for fixing a race, a plan to be partly scripted by Burdick himself. While the illiterate Quentin ghosts the TV script--a wild romp full of yahoo sex and regurgitated TV plots--Burdick decides to set him up for the Big Sleep, thus allowing his own long-delayed coupling with bimbo Bambi. The complex denouement, in which the disparate plots manage to intersect, loses something in Baker's explanation. In any case, the vain and violent ending, cheerfully endorsed by the author, suggests a rather contemptible imagination at play here. The lame moral ("". . .there were no certainties. There never were. That's what Hollywood and horse racing were all about"") certainly proves him predictable.

Pub Date: March 25, 1988

ISBN: 0595386636

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION