Masterfully bitter story in the Bruce Wagner/Michael Tolkin mode with a screenwriter hero who sneers at de rigeur Hollywood happy endings but is provided with one by his author (The Shallow Man, 1995). Language is all this novel downloads—a torrent of L.A. buzzwords and insider cynicism unmatched since Odets and Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success took on Manhattan’s nightlife. As with Tony Curtis’s seedy Sidney Falco, Felske pumps Heywood Hounestein so full of film babble he’s ready to burst. To insecure but WASPish Heywood, who’s written 13 scripts on spec, with not one green-lighted, and who must tar everyone around him with his own shrunken sense of self, any leading man is dismissed as —Starman,— struggling actors as —Strugs,— and pretty faces with few goals as —8xl0s.— When Heywood—accompanied by his beautiful but alcoholic arm piece, Baby Garbo—meets mega-mogul Sydney Swinburn, he sees a way of perhaps getting his masterpiece, the script of his Age of Astonishment, sold at last. A wonderfully literate script, Sydney says, but, sadly, uncommercial, and he is in the business to make money. Still, he sees in Heywood a bookish ladies— man who can bring into this boorish super-producer’s life just what be needs to fill a void: intimacy with the type of woman he has always challenged himself to attain. They strike a Faustian bargain to help each other as Sydney attends Heywood’s charm school. Heywood, however, must not pursue Sydney’s sought-after and mysterious Teal. When Heywood and Teal find each other irresistible, Sydney, the fearsome dark lord, assures Heywood’s destruction in Hollywood. Well, it’s not Marlowe or Goethe, and cynics may snap their fangs at that big-bucks ending, but for film lovers the Hell-A hypechat will flick on all of your fuses.
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52331-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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