THE ALICE '65

In Sullivan’s novel, a British book lover travels to Los Angeles to retrieve a rare volume for his employer and unwittingly becomes embroiled in celebrity scandal.

Adam Verlain works at a small English university as a book cataloguer; his supervisor, Vincent, is constantly frustrated by Adam’s extreme attention to seemingly irrelevant details. Given his annoyance, it’s especially surprising when Vincent asks Adam to travel to the U.S. on behalf of the university to retrieve a special 1865 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The deeply introverted Adam begs his employer to send someone else, but Vincent insists, promising Adam he’ll be met at the airport with the book. After a disastrous plane ride (“the brat vomited on his back”), Adam finds no book waiting at the airport—only a driver, who takes him to meet the book’s owner, none other than famous actress Casey Blanchard. For reasons he can’t understand, Adam is compelled to go with Casey to her movie premiere that night. Despite his protestations, he’s pulled into Casey’s whirlwind life, outfitted by her stylist and whisked off to a high-profile event. Before he knows what’s happened, he finds himself at the center of a celebrity love triangle, a target of the paparazzi, the reluctant friend of a literal black jungle cat, and the unwitting pawn in a plot he could never have imagined. Full of slapstick moments—Adam is attacked by photographers and accidentally consumes drugs—the book provides a comic portrait of life in Los Angeles. Though the tale gets off to a slow start with lengthy, tedious descriptions of books and their provenances, once Adam is ensconced in the LA drama the narrative hits its stride, with characters romping through humorous debacles at a brisk pace. Readers may be tripped up by the odd dialect the author attributes to the Californians (the dropped g’s and diminutives are more suggestive of the American South), but the well-drawn characters’ quirks are endearing.

An unusual and entertaining fish-out-of-water tale.