The Book of Dreams - Softcover

Nova, Craig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983677468 ISBN 13: 9780983677468

Publisher: Pfp Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

  Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, lives in a house like a Norman castle with a view of the Pacific.
  Marta Brooks, blonde and beautiful, takes classified ads for the Romance Advertiser.
  Victor Shaw has spent time in Soledad state prison but understands that his future lies in blackmail.  
  Taylor Hayden, a good hit man, shines his shoes and doesn't ask questions.
  Zimba, a performing elephant, is not as reliable as he looks.

  This is Hollywood, and Craig Nova makes it seem perfectly logical that these creatures should find themselves in the same cast. In his swift, lyrical prose, comic and moving, Craig Nova weaves disparate lives together into a novel that makes utter beauty out of the gritty and grotesque. This is a story about people who are willing to take the chance they have been waiting for all their lives, men and women trying to live up to their dreams.

  The Book of Dreams is also a book about California, that youthful place prematurely aged by the burden of too much longing and desire. And the look of the place, with its heartbreaking, ever receding landscape (seen most often through car windows), haunts this novel. Like a jazz pianist, improvising snatches of other tunes while never straying far from the melody, Nova effortlessly echoes the writers who have helped us see the state in earlier times - Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanial West, all are acknowledged here in graceful, amusing riffs.

  "Using a handful of characters from a high-powered studio chief to a neat-freak hitman whose lives all intersect, Nova spins a gorgeous tale that fully rejuvenates in often surprising fashion the tired Hollywood-novel genre. Despite their familiarity, the characters and their backgrounds are marvelously detailed and ...cliche-free (no small feat in this genre). . . . Nova's eighth novel is so good that it reminds one of the great Day of the Locust." - Library Journal

  "...These flawed but compelling characters are the walking wounded, limping and cringing with residual pain from their love-starved pasts. A potently visual writer, Nova is also adept at articulating the obtuseness of an obsessed or hopeless mind. His eighth novel, perhaps his best, is enticing, unsettling, and gratifyingly noir...." - Booklist

About this title

About the Author

Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His latest novel is The Informer, a literary thriller set in 1930s Berlin.
Nova's writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

From Kirkus Reviews

Nova's Hollywood novel is an ambitious murder/blackmail melodrama full of echoes (Fitzgerald, West, Chandler, even Citizen Kane), but the ambitions get in the way of the melodrama. Movieland's most eligible bachelor, new studio head Warren Hodges, was raised in the unglamorous Hollywood of used-car lots and high school gangs. He has hustled his way to the top but still feels walled in, his lifelong love of illusion intact but unsatisfied. All that changes when he throws a lavish party and is mesmerized by a young blonde. Uninvited guest Marta Brooks is a nobody, a Berkeley droput who places ads for lonelyhearts, an emotional outcast ever since her mother admitted lying about her parentage. She is having the worst day of her life. She killed a mobster in self-defense and is now being blackmailed by ex-con Victor Shaw, who witnessed the incident. Despite her torment, Marta does not confide in the intensely sympathetic Warren, not even during an idyll in his mountain hideaway following the party, and her hard-to-believe silence throws the whole novel out of whack. Warren, the natural lead, becomes a bit player, upstaged by the less interesting but problem-plagued Victor. More trouble stems from Nova's use of a broad canvas; the action constantly stops for another colorful character sketch or another sideshow, and the story trails a passel of loose ends by the time it finally staggers to a denouement involving Marta, Victor, and a hit man who reads Tacitus, with Warren as usual on the sidelines. Enjoy the digressions in Nova's eighth novel (after Trombone, 1992), but don't expect a satisfying narrative payoff or a coherent vision of contemporary Tinseltown. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pfp Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983677468
• ISBN 13: 9780983677468
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 382