Karoo: A Novel - Hardcover

Tesich, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002959 ISBN 13: 9780151002955

Publisher: Harcourt, 1998

Synopsis

Saul Karoo, a successful but overweight, heavy-drinking, and chain-smoking Hollywood script doctor, searches for a solution to the personal problems that threaten his life and happiness, but the path he chooses may turn out to be even more deadly

About this title

Review:

There are far more tragicomic possibilities in the lives of gracelessly aging men than one might suspect, and the list of writers who have taken advantage of them is small but fertile--Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow among them. The late Steve Tesich, best known for his original screenplay for Breaking Away, joins this august group with the tale of Saul Karoo, a wealthy, alcoholic Hollywood script doctor plagued by exactly the kind of banal problems that he has ruthlessly edited out of the scripts of others--most notably a fear of intimacy. He meets regularly with his estranged wife Dianah to discuss the academic question of their ever-impending divorce and celebrate the anniversary of their separation. "Tender, deeply felt, full of love, that's the kind of divorce we had in mind... The more we talked about divorce, the more married we seemed." His adopted teenage son, Billy, keeps pushing for more dedicated father-son contact, to Karoo's great discomfort: "I loved Billy, but I was absolutely incapable of loving him in private where it was just the two of us. That was another disease I had... Evasion of privacy. Evasion at all cost of privacy of any kind. With anyone."

A doctor tells Karoo that he's shrinking vertically and swelling horizontally, as if to push the world even further away. But when he signs on to re-cut the last film of dying directorial great Arthur Houseman, he discovers Leila, Billy's natural mother, playing a bit part in the film, and from that moment he's transformed. In a bizarre twist, the unbelievable melodrama that follows from his attempt to engineer happiness from this coincidence is the stuff of a blockbuster script--offered to him, naturally, for the writing. Karoo is bitter and cynical to the core, but the somewhat heavy-handed ending embraces the possibility of redemption even as it delivers the final insult to its unhappy hero.

From the Back Cover:

Saul Karoo is a successful Hollywood script doctor, a fixer of flawed films. He is fifty, overweight, a heavy drinker and chain smoker. He is at an age when things break down, but he has no health insurance. His separation from his wife, Dianah, has become another form of marriage. His relationship with his son, Billy, a college student, is one of pure avoidance. He cannot free himself from the grip of the powerful producer Jay Cromwell. The unnecessary scenes that he has effortlessly cut from other people's screenplays seem to threaten his own life. But Saul Karoo is the ultimate fixer. He must find an emotional and intellectual solution - one that may in the end prove more deadly than the problems it was intended to solve.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0151002959
• ISBN 13: 9780151002955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406