Dark Tinseltown satire with more rage than laughs.
In this debut novel from screenwriter Ver Wiel, a burnt-out screenwriter plunges into the bizarro world of his own subconscious after ingesting a potent combination of over-the-counter sleep aids.
Estranged from his unfaithful movie-star wife and fixated on the woman he should have married, writer Morgan Beale holes up in a Sunset Strip hotel room ostensibly to work on the movie script of a popular comic novel called The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag. It is not going well. Hating himself almost as much as he hates the vapid Hollywood industry machine that made him a success, he numbs himself nightly with “the handshake,” a mixture of pills and red wine. It is during one bender that he “wakes up” to find himself in the middle of a nightmarish movie shoot. Literally stuck to his typewriter, the alienated 44-year-old watches helplessly as the novelist whose work he is adapting gets thrown into a fathomless pit by Armani-clad producer chimps from Hell. Luckily, Morgan is also reunited with his long-dead mentor Luke, a fellow scribe who has been transformed into a brave little Chihuahua. He and Luke team up with a group of ethnically diverse dwarves to battle the evil forces of modern celebrity-obsessed consumerist society. Really. In Morgan’s mind, these offenders include brainless morning talk-show hosts, talent-challenged reality-show wannabes, right-wingers and, of course, the titular java giant. During the wacky free-for-all (a robot, FEMA trucks and his wife all make appearances), he reminisces about his work and life, and especially the tragic lack of creativity in the movie business, while hoping for another chance. That is, if he ever wakes up. Ver Wiel’s debut burns with the righteous anger of a disillusioned insider; it would have benefited from more character development and a lighter hand.
Dark Tinseltown satire with more rage than laughs.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-868-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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