His Little Women: A Novel - Hardcover

Rossner, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671648586 ISBN 13: 9780671648589

Publisher: Summit Books, 1990

Synopsis

The four daughters of Hollywood producer Sam Pearlstein--by three different wives--vie in a fervent race for their father's attention

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Laboriously contrived, rambling and lacking momentum, Rossner's ( Looking for Mr. Goodbar ) new novel is an unsuccessful amalgam of Hollywood inside story and attempts at "meaningful" statements about the tensions between a fiction writer's creative use of real-life situations and her responsibility to avoid libelous characterizations. The eponymous "little women" are the four daughters of movie tycoon Sam Pearlstein by the three wives whom he leaves like a snake shedding skins. Nell, Sam's second daughter, is the narrator; an attorney, she competes for her father's love and attention with her older half-sister, Louisa, whose novel, a thinly disguised portrait of Sam, occasions a libel suit; the other two girls, lost in the drug culture, are minor characters. After a promising beginning that establishes expectations of a scandal (only a tepid one, it turns out), Rossner segues into a trite description of teenaged Nell's seduction by a repulsive studio lackey. The novel becomes crowded with caricatures of unlovely Hollywood types, all as flimsy as a strip of celluloid. The complex plotting that leads to the law suit is tortuous and, worse, represents wasted effort, since the climactic trial scene holds little suspense. At times, Rossner is capable of thoughtful writing: on sibling rivalry, Jews in the movie industry, the fiction writer's art. While the book will undoubtedly please a commercial market, it will disappoint fans of the author who expect better. Literary Guild main selection.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Too many story lines drain dramatic tension in this sprawling novel about movie mogul Sam Pearlstein and his four daughters from three marriages. Writer Louisa Abrahms and lawyer Nell Berman, from marriages one and two, are drawn together by their adoration of Daddy (who can be a charmer), by the libel suit brought against Louisa's novel about a Hollywood producer and his daughters, and by the search for truth as each sees it. Nell, whose story this is, ponders the line between fiction and truth, a legal and personal question for her and a potential focus for this book, which dwells on Sam and his womanizing, stepfamilies' histories and squabbles, the trial, even the emerging women's movement. Rossner ( Looking for Mr. Goodbar; August) can create wonderfully full-bodied characters and tell a fine story (and do it concisely, as in a memorable account of Nell's marriage in just 18 pages)--but here she squanders her talents. Literary Guild main selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/89.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., V a .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Summit Books
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0671648586
• ISBN 13: 9780671648589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 367