Pool

After walking off the set of a $40 million picture, Hollywood superstar Emery Roberts flees to the lush hills of Vermont, where a group of self-exiled Hollywood players have taken refuge. A first novel. 15,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

"Having a little existential crisis, are we? . . . I think I should tell you it's been done before." Thus friend and reluctant host Jeremiah aptly pronounces the emotional bankruptcy not only of weltschmerz -y 20-something megastar Emery Roberts, on the run from his current film, his lover and his life in general, but also of this glib debut novel's account of his troubles. Although Emery flees to the sweltering New England summer, he brings with him a dense Hollywood smog of dropped names and industry backbiting, and an incestuous tangle of relationships where the boundaries between business and the personal are lost to sight. Emery's porous sanctuary is a Vermont farmhouse peopled by other Hollywood exiles, none of them happy, none of them free, none of them content. Unfortunately, none of them--alcoholic poor little rich girl, embittered sidelined agent, etc.--is very interesting either, and Emery's own drained, affectless musings can't redeem them from the superficiality to which Sahgal's dialogue-dominated prose, appropriately adopting the lucid, declarative calm of a screenplay, condemns them. That these characters are trapped in a world of surfaces is of course the point--and Sahgal's central metaphor, a redundant lakeside swimming pool, whose excavation the motley gang's dissipated, debilitated energies cannot complete, rams it home--but while Sahgal is a first rate purveyor of Variety in-jokes, as a novelist he has yet to venture out of the shallow end.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A disaffected Hollywood megastar flees from L.A. and the movie he's making to seek refuge in a Vermont haven for kindred spirits- -in UCLA film graduate Sahgal's first, distressingly feeble novel. Emery Roberts arrives unannounced at Jeremiah's hideaway with his sidekick, the camcorder-toting Danny, having decamped from the set in secret after breaking up with his lover/manager Danielle. The house is a mess due to renovations, with a full complement of misfits in residence: Nathan the red-hot screenwriter, interested only in building a pool for himself by hand and in eradicating the population of snapping turtles in Jeremiah's lake; Louis the ex- talent agent, drinking his way through nights and days while his ambitious actress girlfriend sleeps her way to the top; and Anne, Jeremiah's sister, no less dissipated than the rest but ready to offer solace to Emery in his near-catatonic state of loneliness. Hollywood soon catches wind of the errant star's whereabouts, prompting a visit from his producer--who happens to be Jeremiah's father--and Danielle, but when they fail to persuade Emery to return to the movie, they bring the movie to him. In between binges, backbiting, and bouts of pool-digging, the filming continues, with the star once again compliant; and by the time the shoot is finished, his career is back on track--with no one the wiser, or especially interested, as to why. A dialogue-driven brat-pack clone without the bile: a vapid trashing of Tinseltown types achieving the dubious honor of being even more inconsequential than the feckless, shallow characters it depicts. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Described as The Day of the Locust meets Generation X, this first novel by a Californian friendly with brat packers literary and cinematic aims barbs at the heart of Hollywood.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Young, hunky, and sullen megastar Emery Roberts has just walked off the L.A. set of an absurdly expensive movie, and a lot of people are pissed. He makes his escape with a sidekick named Danny, a compulsive, camcorder-toting film student, and they high-tail it all the way to Vermont, where friends of Emery's, fellow Hollywood drop-outs, are drinking the summer away. Only Danny, Jeremiah, and Nathan keep busy. Danny tapes everything, allegedly for a documentary about Emery; Jeremiah is, albeit haphazardly, fixing up a 100-year-old house; and Nathan is attempting to dig a hole big enough for a full-size swimming pool with nothing more than a shovel. There's a large pond nearby, but it's overrun with snapping turtles. Anne and Louis stay drunk, although Louis finds enough energy to lob insults at Emery as fanatically as crazy Nathan blasts away at the turtles with a BB-gun when he's tired of digging. It's hot, humid, mosquitoey, boozy, hopeless, and utterly convincing. Screenwriter Sahgal's fiction debut is a strikingly nihilistic tale told with viperish humor, biting dialogue, and a perfect sense of timing. He sneaks behind the facade of movie glamour and reveals nothing more than a shallow pit, a half-dug grave for the willfully brain-dead. Donna Seaman