May 30, 2008

“My Liar” by Rachel Cline

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Hollywood novels have a natural allure. Rachel Cline, a screenwriter and author of a previous novel, “What to Keep,” uses the Tinseltown setting to good advantage in her new work, “My Liar.”

An unassertive and insecure film editor, Annabeth Jensen, becomes entangled in a friendship with a hip indie-film director, Laura Katz, and their ephemeral, tricky relationship is mirrored by the illusory nature of the movie business.

Unfortunately, the complexity of Hollywood, commerce and artistic endeavors proves to be more interesting than the maddening relationship between Annabeth and Laura.

Desperate for Laura’s approval, Annabeth displays one of the least attractive aspects of show business: the neediness. I kept thinking about Sally Field’s infamous trill after winning her second Oscar, “You like me, right now, you like me!”

Annabeth, who comes to Hollywood from Minnesota, escaping an alcoholic father and angry mother, is fully imagined and well drawn, but Laura, about whom we learn less, is more compelling. Explaining Annabeth to her husband, Laura says, “She’s not really someone I need to cultivate professionally, and she can be a bit … snarky, but sometimes there’s this, I don’t know, momentum when we talk, like when you have a crush on someone in high school. … It’s just weird.”

And yes, it is weird, and it gets weirder. Annabeth and Laura begin working together, on Laura’s low-budget movie about a wide-eyed girl from the Midwest who comes to Hollywood for fame and fortune like thousands before her, and in the process their relationship shifts from adolescent crush to something, well, more deeply neurotic. The movie, titled “Trouble Doll,” is yet another mirror in the funhouse of reflections Hollywood stories often become.

Cline is a gifted writer with a clean, economical style, and she well understands both the psychology and the topography of Los Angeles and the movie business. Though I suspect Annabeth may embody some of Cline’s experiences as an artist in Hollywood, Laura seems to be the character with whom the author is more engaged.

Making a movie, like most serious efforts at art, requires an almost monomaniacal, and sometimes ruthless, devotion. The most interesting relationship in this book, for me, was the one between Laura and her movie.

Sunday, July 19, 1992

“Rich Kids” by Robert Westbrooke

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review

You will probably not be shocked to learn that the children of rich movie-industry parents are likely to grow up spoiled, unhappy and mentally unhealthy. Robert Westbrook brings personal experience to the subject, however, as the son of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham.
His self-written bio sheet claims he couldn’t publish this book while his mother was alive. Best known as the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she presumably had standards in fiction. “Rich Kids” would have horrified her.

Jonno Singer, the narrator, is the son of Alexander Singer, a literary agent who becomes a studio president, a man attracted to women on the basis of what Westbrook knowingly describes as “Hollywood Love . . . the
kind of love which mysteriously evaporates the moment the circumstances of mutual self-advantage disappear.”

The elder Singer’s first wife commits suicide after her career and husband fail her. His second wife is Corina Norman, “a fabulously sexpot actress,” and Jonno’s mother.

When Corina’s career cools off, as “it” girl careers inevitably do, she becomes a self-pitying drunk. This is no great loss to Jonno, because you can’t lose what you don’t have. “She was hardly a mother at all except for a few minutes here and there in various photo opportunities, where she smiled into the camera with Rags and Carl on either side of her, and me–the baby–generally in her lap. The moment the photographer was finished, she’d brush us off like flies and return us to the care of our butler, Albert. . . . Our crime was being born and ruining her beautiful figure.”

When Corina’s career goes from cool to cold outright failure, Jonno’s father, true to Hollywood Love, finds another wife. Enter French star Michelle Cordell, “sluttish and slovenly,” usually stoned on hashish. She gives Jonno such maternal advice as “You must not smoke marijuana and drink alcohol at the same time. It will make you impotent when you try to
make love to the girls!” Jonno and his two brothers, Rags and Carl, are joined by Michelle’s children, David, and Zoe, the half-sister Jonno describes with every erotic adjective he can muster.

“Rich Kids” has something like a plot–Jonno’s father is murdered with his own Oscar and the question is which family member did it, but this is forgotten for many chapters while the narrator details his family life:

His oldest brother Rags is dying of AIDS. Rags, verbally abused by Corina, spends several years totaling cars for sport and having sex with the beloved butler Albert. Carl, second oldest, badly burned in a fire started by Corina when drunk, is a semi-socialist who runs a shelter for the homeless. Arguably the worst off and least interesting (until she murders someone) is little sister Opera, a 15-year-old TV star about to make the first “environmentally conscious teen movie.”

Half-brother David, who learns young Republicanism from the Los Angeles Harvard School and S&M from Gretchen the maid, grows up to run dad’s movie studio. Most important to Jonno is Zoe, of whom he can’t stop himself from saying  things like, “If I felt I could get away with it, I’d let my tongue come out and rest against her inner thigh. I used to imagine I was an abalone clinging to a bare girl leg.”

If this sounds incestuous, it is. Much in “Rich Kids” seems wrong, particularly the way in which Westbrook exposes and trashes the warped values of Hollywood while at the same time trying to move the reader with the narrator’s oft-stated lust and star-crossed “love” for his half-sister Zoe.

This incest is a direct byproduct of the very world the narrator and author despise. (Zoe’s father began molesting her when she was 5 and continued into her teen years.) While Westbrook occasionally hits chords that ring with awful truth, he has the Hollywood habit of shirking truth’s consequences.

“Rich Kids” ends with Jonno married to Zoe, flying back and forth between Los Angeles, where he has taken control of his dad’s movie studio, and Peru, where Zoe feeds llamas. Jonno lives with her as though she’s his wife, and we’re to believe their life is a happy one.

The book is also cheapened by sentences out of “The Perils of Pauline” that end almost every chapter: “The limousine took off in a ride I will never forget”; careless editing–tenses are forgotten and “you’re” is used as a possessive; the dozen or so times you’re told it’s not easy being a rich kid; constant explaining that undercuts the natural strength of the action.

Yet somehow “Rich Kids” is disturbingly compelling. This, I suspect, is thanks to the powerful allure the perversions and ruins of Hollywood still possess, something Westbrook understands, has seemingly suffered from, and here exploits.

Mark Lindquist is the author of Sad Movies and Carnival Desires.

Sunday, February 13, 1994

“Pool” by Ajay Sahgal

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Front Page

“Pool” is one of the most authentic Los Angeles novels you are likely to read and the beauty of it is that not a single moment is set in L.A.

Emery Roberts, a twentysomething movie star, has walked off the set of “Sun City,” a $40 million dollar buddy cop thriller, and gone to Vermont. The reader has no idea why. Emery, the narrator, also has no idea why.

“Pool” could have been subtitled “Portrait of an Unexamined Life” or “Why One Should Avoid Hanging Out with Young Actors.” Pointedly anti-plot and with ciphers for characters, “Pool” is nonetheless compelling thanks to Sahgal’s spare, cryptic prose.

“Pool” is “Waiting for Godot” for a generation whose gods are celluloid. This first novel is funny, sad, and filled with shocks of recognition, particularly for those who have ever felt lost in the modern Sodom known as Hollywood. “I can’t go on. I must go on. I can’t keep writing screenplays. I must keep writing screenplays.”

In Vermont Emery joins other Hollywood expatriates who are holed up at a farmhouse: a screenwriter, a fired CAA agent, and the “Sun City” producer’s alcoholic daughter and useless son. Along with Emery is Danny, a USC film school grad, the “next Phil Joanou,” who films Emery’s every move on videotape. Emery is oblivious to Danny and his omnipresent camera in much the same way that normal people in, say, Seattle, are oblivious to rain.

Necessarily lacking the physical details of L.A. – no Santa Ana winds, no sweet eucalyptic wetness in the air, no wild-eyed coyotes to run over in a Range Rover -“Pool” proves that L.A. is merely a transportable state of mind. L.A. is convincingly, disturbingly, brought to life in the Vermont countryside.

There’s all the vernacular, banter, celebrity fixation, and barely repressed anger endemic to Los Angeles. And it is not limited to the expatriates. When Emery visits the local bars, townie
girls fawn senselessly over him and their boyfriends want to kill him.

When the group needs money, they have a garage sale and there are plenty of local buyers for Emery’s used Yamamato blazer, and his unread copy of “Ulysses” – for the musical version with a score by Michael Bolton.

Only one character in the novel seems to have a goal of any kind: the screenwriter. He is building a pool in the backyard. And it is not just a goal, but an obsession. Though this is ostensibly motivated by the snapping turtles that roam the nearby lake in menacing packs, there is clearly more at stake.

Building the pool is the screenwriter’s raison d’etre. He envisions a cool, turtle-less place, a thing of beauty. What he creates, mostly, is a big hole filled with mud. And then the snapping turtles invade. This is one of the smartest, funniest metaphors for a screenwriter’s life that I have ever read.

“Pool” is chock full of wickedly funny bits that will be especially appreciated by industry insiders. Characters make deadpan references to movies with hilarious titles and plot lines that are all the funnier because the joke-movies are no more absurd than, say, “Encino Man,” “Problem Child,” “Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot,” or any number of other wildly profitable movies.

“Pool” has plenty of set pieces that scriptwriters are paid to fill pages with: a brawl, a roman candle fight, a car crash, and the big production number when an entire movie crew invades the farm house. What’s interesting is that these scenes read like parodies of what one would expect. The idiot-proof drama that makes these paint-by-number scenes popular with studio executives seems to be intentionally filtered out.

The characters in “Pool” are so disconnected from what is genuine that they feel nothing. There is not much to be felt in a cliché. There is not much to be felt when nothing is valued. This valuelessness that kills the possible joy of these characters lives even creeps into the sex scenes. They’ve arrived young to what self involvement and constant indulgence invariably lead to: emptiness, burn out.

Hollywood, in the end, wins. Emery becomes resigned to his fate, and his fate is to fly first class, have beautiful strange girls beg to sleep with him, and make millions of dollars, without ever understanding anything about any of it. If this does not sound especially hellish, it will after you read this scarily convincing portrait.

Emery’s most redeeming quality is that he is mercifully free of the self-involved self-help posturing that substitute in Los Angeles for living an examined life. Even that requires more self-examination than Emery can muster. He does, however, perform Public Service Announcements for “Rock Against Fur.”

Pete Hamill, after hanging around drunks and actresses for too many years, came to a realization. Hamill recognized, as he put it, that he had been performing rather than living his life. He stopped drinking. This saved him.

The characters in Sahgal’s novel are light years away from this kind of realization, and probably incapable of the kind of action that might save them. Sahgal wisely knows what about this is sad, funny, and, at moments, even moving.

“Pool” will not be a bestseller. It may, however, be destined for cult-classic status in Los Angeles.

Mark Lindquist is the author of two Hollywood novels, Sad Movies and Carnival Desires.

July 4, 1999

Wormwood” by David Levien

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

This first novel was apparently written in the early to mid-nineties, but not published. Levien went on to co-write the screenplay for “Rounders,” a Miramax Pictures release starring Matt Damon, which was a hit.

Now Miramax, an organization known for its chummy relationships with artists, is publishing Levien’s youthful Hollywood novel.

These are not circumstances that would lead you to expect a good book, but “Wormwood” is a surprise pleasure. Nathan Pitch, the narrator, comes to Los Angeles with the requisite desire: “We wanted to get in, we wanted to make movies, we wanted to profit by this, to be made special from it.”

Pitch climbs up in the industry until he questions what he is doing, and falls. He becomes involved with the wrong woman – though at least she’s not an actress – and the wrong drink, absinthe. Wormwood is the root that gives absinthe both its intoxicating and toxic qualities, and it also gives Levien an apt symbol for Hollywood.

Levien knows the industry, knows its characters, knows their language and follies. He is insightful and truthful and clever. His weakness is his still-developing prose style. Related shortcomings include a tendency to explain too much – screenwriters are not allowed this indulgence and Levien runs amok.

Part of the mystique of Los Angeles is due to its peculiar environment: the palm trees, the sweet eucalyptus, the Santa Ana winds and so on. Sometimes it feels as though Levien intends to let a cinematographer and art director fill in texture later.

“Wormwood” is not quite artful enough to compete with classics like Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust,” or Joan Didion’s “Play it as it Lays,” but  it’s certainly worthy of honorable mention in the Hollywood genre pantheon.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, December 28, 2003

“Still Holding” by Bruce Wagner

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

How much hypocrisy, insanity, neediness, dysfunction and delusion can an author stuff into a novel of just under 300 pages? If the author is Bruce Wagner and the subject is Hollywood, the answer is a big fat amazing boatload.

In “Still Holding,” Wagner’s multiple story lines revolve around 34-year-old movie star Kit Lightfoot, a practicing Buddhist and People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Everyone loves Kit, except Kit. “He hated the way he acted, the way he spoke, the way he thought.”

His girlfriend is a vulgar TV actress named Viv Wembley, who seems to most enjoy sitting on the toilet while she gives miscellaneous orders to her personal assistant. Kit and Viv have nothing in common but fame. In fact, the debilitating craving for fame is what links most of Wagner’s characters.

Becca Mondrain, a Drew Barrymore look-alike, becomes Viv’s assistant while she’s waiting for her proverbial big break. Her boyfriend is a Russell Crowe look-alike. They are both up for parts in a new Spike Jonze movie about look-alikes, “about the nature of celebrity and what this town does to people.”

Kit, meanwhile, is up for a Darren Aronofsky-directed movie about a movie star who becomes brain damaged in a car crash, just as he’s about to do a movie about a mentally handicapped man. Then, as the meta-ironies pile up, Kit is bonked on the head with a bottle by a Kit Lightfoot look-alike and, yep, Kit suffers brain damage himself.

As farcical as the plot twists become, the novel never loses its documentary sense of authenticity. Real-life celebrities mingle with Wagner’s fictional creations, a technique others have used, but Wagner takes it to a new extreme. The fictional characters seem no less real, and no more fake, than the real-life characters.

In a repetitive ironic touch, raging egoists take up Buddhism, feeding their egos through a pose of ego-negation.

Wagner’s only failing may be that in his successful effort to be merciless, virtually every character is despicable or pathetic, except for maybe Rob Reiner, which makes for a long 296 pages.

Entertainment & Arts: Friday, February 16, 2007

Reviews

It’s a book that reads like a movie and demands to be read in one sitting; you get the same pleasure from reading this book that you can get from movies. It not only captures a certain Hollywood lifestyle, but it also sums up the period…. Sad Movies is both hilarious and affirmative, two traits which one rarely comes across in good books about Los Angeles — and which are both totally welcome here.

Bret Easton Ellis

Perceptive and hilarious…. One of the best sketches about a young man’s attempt to find himself since The Graduate.

New York Newsday

Among the most promising writers of his generation…. Lindquist’s sharp eye for detail defines not only his characters, but the entire atmosphere of 1980s Hollywood.

Los Angeles Reader

A strange, swiftly paced story that is funny and curiously powerful.

Denver Post

Clever … whimsical … a novel in dialogue about seeking the meaning of life.

Publishers Weekly

Lip-smackingly decadent … I can hardly wait for the movie.

New York Times Book Review

Not long ago, Gary Fisketjon left Vintage Books, where he had made a significant mark, to join Atlantic Monthly Press. He has taken with him at least one major author in Richard Ford, and the strong visual design that characterized his Vintage books. He has clearly not lost his ability to find good young American writing, if this new trade paperback is any indication…. Sad Movies begins like a hip, west coast version of Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing, it soon turns into a sort of hip, west coast G.K. Chesterton’s Manalive…. Sad Movies is a rapid-fire, roller coaster sort of book…. Mark Lindquist has written an intriguing, likable novel, and Gary Fisketjon’s post-Vintage reputation appears safe.

Bookroom Review

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1990, Carnival Desires is now available on Kindle at Amazon. Carnival Desires follows a group of friends in their twenties through the trapdoors and funhouse mirrors of Hollywood in the 1980s….

What was once contemporary fiction is now a period piece. You can read about Carnival Desires in Vanity Fair or Details Magazine.

Reviews

Great postmodern literature. Romantic and cynical, true and original, full of modern ideas and seductive moments … as of its time as such classics as Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon.

Details Magazine

A witty minimalist epic … with the smart, spare prose only an outsider on the Hollywood inside can afford.

Vanity Fair

Real characters in recognizable situations, written with wit and intelligence … the best contemporary novel about young Hollywood.

Los Angeles Reader

Carnival Desires is a story of today’s equivalent of the Bright Young Things. This is not a novel I would recommend to my mother or my aunts, but every priest, teaching sister, and director of religious education ought to be required to read it. Then they would understand why our religion must be taught exhaustively…. As for Mark Lindquist, he may well become the Evelyn Waugh of 21st Century America.

Catholic Twin Circle

Lindquist’s hip, lean dialogue and litany of debaucheries amuses, along with knowing flashes of behind-the-scenes Hollywood.

Publishers Weekly

Insightful … skillful … graceful.

Seattle Times

What could be more exciting than life in the fast lane of Hollywood? Just one long glitzy party in that familiar fantasy land of mansions and swimming pools, studios and trendy clubs. The only problem is, how do you get out of the fast lane when you find yourself slowing down?

This is starting to be the question for Bick Smith, going on 30, and his wealthy and/or talented friends Willie and Merri, Oscar and Mona, Tim and Joy. Willie and Merri will make it okay because they love each other, Oscar and Mona, probably, because they love their work. But for Tim and Joy, the only way out is a fatal crash. Bick gets off with only a smashed fender and a flat tire, presumably because his feelings are so ambivalent. One episode sums them up: Bick and his girlfriend, Jayne, go on the “Graveline Tour” — the sightseeing excursion past the places where famous Hollywood stars have died. As the trip proceeds, the guide’s repetition of “heavy alcoholism,” “rampant promiscuity” and “tragic death” becomes numbing: “Bick was both pained and perversely proud to be reminded that he was a part of something so ugly and so historically evil.”

Between his friend Libby, who doesn’t really belong to Hollywood, and Jayne, who is its very embodiment, the living projection of his own fiction, Bick wavers. Similarly, he wavers between the urge to run home to Seattle and lead a “normal more religious life” and the battered but still-breathing sense of vocation and of solidarity with friends in Los Angeles.

Like the milieu it describes, Mark Lindquist’s novel is glamorous, ribald, and clever if not always careful. What holds it together is a style of intense nervous suspense, reflected in the characters’ anxiety about endings. Oscar and Bick are both rewriting the ending of a film that in some ways is each man’s own story. Will Oscar’s teenage hero go for the bimbo cheerleader, or will he realize in time that it’s the other girl he really loves? Will Bick’s tormented husband and wife save each other or destroy each other?

Lindquist has a fine ear for dialogue and excels at varying scenes and voices, from witty repartee to drama to anguish, from the satiric to the erotic to the exuberantly scabrous. There is also a lot of movie talk that may be appreciated by those who keep up with the Hollywood scene.

Despite its suggestive title, there is no overt questioning of values in Carnival Desires. Values are traditional and mainstream. The novel even ends with a wedding. What is subverted is the role those values play. The characters seem to glimpse them in outer space from time to time, but almost never as guiding stars — much less stars to wish upon.

Anyway, are people who already have everything still capable of wishing? If they don’t constantly enjoy self-satisfaction, at least they do practice constant self-indulgence. And as Lindquist shows, even their self-destructive tendencies are perversely self-protective, a defense against pressure and paranoia, a substitute for religion and conscience.

The reduction of acts to images and the rejection of action as value-creating mark this novel’s post-modernism even more than its hip style and La Dolce Vita subject matter.

Carnival Desires may share the fate of many other works that paint too colorful a picture of the evils they purport to denounce. The public that finds books less satisfying than sex, alcohol, drugs, and MTV, is hardly likely to read — much less heed — the author’s warning to grow up before it’s too late. Despite his variation on the now-popular orgy-in-a-graveyard theme, we have a sneaking feeling that Lindquist still thinks some people can have it all.

Sally Pouvoir, Houston Chronicle

Mark Lindquist is the author of four novels, The King of Methlehem, published by Simon & Schuster in 2007, Never Mind Nirvana, published by Random House/Villard in 2001, Carnival Desires, published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1990, and Sad Movies, published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987.

His books have been bestsellers, are published in more than ten languages, and have been widely and well reviewed by major publications.

“Echoes and ties to both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.”– Boston Globe

“Lindquist … captures the zeitgeist.  He does what no one has done as well before.” – Buffalo News

“Dialogue that’s absolutely pitch-perfect.” – Washington Post

“Great postmodern literature.” – Details

“Deadpan and witty.” – LA Weekly

“Smart, spare prose.” – Vanity Fair

“All is handled with wit and style by Lindquist.” – Detroit News

“Lindquist … once again has a view of the zeitgeist.” – Los Angeles Times