Chimney Rock - Hardcover

Smith, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805022449 ISBN 13: 9780805022445

Publisher: Henry Holt, 1993

Synopsis

Hailed for his "appalling brilliance" on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, Charlie Smith is like the Titan who stole fire from heaven: a novelist of Promethean originality and daring who in three enduring novels - Canaan, Shine Hawk, and The Lives of the Dead - has given us a vision that is at once achingly beautiful, violent, erotic, and, at the last, full of grace.
In Chimney Rock, Smith takes on the illusion and madness of America's factory of fantasy. Hollywood is home for Smith's narrator, Will Blake, the scion of two generations of movie folk, himself an actor by default, though a good one, for who could better play a role or steal the show than a homeboy, raised where make-believe is every bit as real as what's real.
Smith's Los Angeles is the end of the American line, the place where the West ran out of itself and turned inward, its pioneers become impresarios, mining myths, not gold. Will's father, Clement, is the ape of Hollywood, hell-bent to produce the next spectacle of mayhem and excess, seduce the next woman, and willing to destroy whatever stands in his way. Between father and son there is much bitterness. There is the memory of Will's brother, Bobby, a suicide; and Jennie White, Will's mother, who has withstood her husband's voraciousness only at great cost. But when Clement takes an interest in Will's wife, Kate - known to the world as the actress Zebra Dunn, she is Smith's most incandescent creation - this lifelong antipathy erupts in a deadly struggle.
Part murder mystery, part family tragedy, part exploration of the extreme personality, Chimney Rock burns in a white heat from beginning to end and succeeds in questioning, even redefining, the limits of invention.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Smith's gigantic talent, most recently on display in The Lives of the Dead (1990) and the novellas of Crystal River (1991), slips the harness once again to produce this lusty, fiery Hollywood saga in which world-class egos collide to fuel a family feeding frenzy. Hardly one to handle psychodrama in half-measure, Smith tunes the tortured soul motif to a fever pitch in the figure of bitter, brittle Willie Blake, a still-rising superstar in the Hollywood firmament who nevertheless is undone when he learns that his father, Clement, has added Will's wife, screen goddess Zebra (Kate) Dunn, to his list of liaisons--and that the passion between the two is mutual. Clement is himself a Tinseltown legend, a producer of disaster extravaganzas that found diminishing favor at the box office but who refused to give an inch to the up-and-coming generation, least of all to his own flesh and blood. Having driven one son to suicide as a teenager and robbed his wife of her Oscar- winning career and vitality, he sees in the incandescent personality of Will's wife the perfect complement to his undimmed desires. The clash between titanic father and outraged son begins on a beach in Mexico, after Will learns that Kate is pregnant with Clement's child, but the endgame is played out amid the fires of rage in L.A., with Kate's career having been ruined by disfigurement and another woman's charred corpse having placed both men under suspicion of murder. Relentlessly emotional with impressive pyrotechnics, but ultimately overheated: those awaiting a story that holds together after the sound and fury subside will be disappointed. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Startling images of Hollywood decadence and personal turmoil pervade this prodigious, literate tale of Oedipal conflict amid the pretense and excesses of the contemporary American film industry. In the tradition of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust , the novel evokes a landscape of unabashed perversion and atavism, thinly cloaked by the glamour of the silver screen. Narrator and protagonist Will Blake is a third-generation insider, a spiritual drifter who sleepwalked into movie stardom with a natural talent that has earned him three Oscar nominations. Reeling from the breakup of his marriage to world-renowned actress Zebra Dunn, nursing the permanent wound of his brother's suicide, locked in dangerous conflict with his father, Clement (a violent, monomaniacal producer), Will becomes increasingly unstable as he traces the nearly invisible line separating reality from illusion in his bizarre hometown. Smith ( The Lives of the Dead ) writes relentlessly, in waves of rich, elaborate metaphor full of fresh insights and probing speculations about a milieu so often treated superficially. Rather than invoking real-life stars, he creates his own fully imagined movieland characters, who help make the novel's vision convincing and complete. His agile, dynamic prose captures both the deep reveries and the grotesque crucibles of Will's story. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0805022449
• ISBN 13: 9780805022445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 388