The Book of Dreams - Hardcover

Craig Nova

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395636507 ISBN 13: 9780395636503

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1994

Synopsis

Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, lives in a house like a Norman castle with a view of the Pacific.
Marta Brooks, blond 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, 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, Nathanael West, all are acknowledged here in graceful, amusing riffs. But in its exact mix of wit, acuity of vision, and evocation of desire, this novel could only have been written by Craig Nova. Indeed, The Book of Dreams demonstrates afresh that, in the words of Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, "scarcely anyone else is in Nova's league."

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.

Reviews

In his eighth novel, Nova ( The Good Son ; Trombone ) returns to his hometown of Hollywood for this suspenseful but problematic story of murder and blackmail. Fans will recognize the author's trademark convergent plot construction as he steers his three major characters toward a final, climactic meeting. Movie mogul Warren Hodges is all too willing to leave behind his studio trappings for the love of blonde Marta Brooks, a personals magazine receptionist he meets at one of his frequent parties. But Hodges doesn't know that the woman has accidentally killed a local porn king while picking up some film for her sleazy boss. The killing is witnessed by small-time hood Victor Shaw, whose visions of blackmail are hindered by the hit man who has been trailing him since Shaw's last job. Nova deftly interweaves a glitzy Hollywood background with some good noir atmosphere, and he scores telling points in his complicated yarn by revealing the essential hollowness of both crooks and bigwigs. The relationship between the mogul and the working girl never really clicks, however, leaving little justification for the love-struck Hodges to pursue the risky romance. Moreover, the finale falls curiously flat, although it does feature a literally smashing appearance by an ex-circus elephant that performs at children's parties.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Using a handful of characters from a high-powered studio chief to a neat-freak hitman whose lives all intersect, Nova (Trombone, LJ 4/15/92) 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 mostly cliche-free (no small feat in this genre). As usual, Nova constantly flirts with overwriting, so as a noirish thriller this work is a little slow and flat. In addition, he sometimes reaches pretty far to vary his descriptions of L.A.'s foul air, which he uses as moral indicators for his characters, none of whose cars seems to be running very well either. Despite the title, once innocence wears off, there are no dreams in Hollywood because they are all shoved up there on the screen. Nova's eighth novel is so good that it reminds one of the great Day of the Locust, with an oddly similar, crushed-innocence ending, although here Nova uses a large elephant rampaging through Malibu. Don't ask. Read.
David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hollywood is accomplished novelist Nova's hometown, a locale he interprets as an incendiary place of tarnished beauty and unbridled greed, tired hedonism, and habitual delusion. In his last novel, Trombone , L.A. was a dark peripheral presence, but here the city is a malignant force, pushing its cynical and exhausted inhabitants beyond the limits of reason and the reach of emotions. As the title suggests, this is an episodic novel, a series of enigmatic vignettes that waver between the ordinary and the surreal. At first, any sense of connectedness between these alarming wide-awake dreams is just an intimation, but soon we intuit that all the separate strands will eventually twist together. We know, for instance, that Warren Hodges, a lonely and fearless self-made millionaire, will get over the abrupt termination of his peculiarly laconic relationship with a baseball-obsessed gypsy and pursue young, ethereally beautiful, and frightened Marta, just as we know that the jittery ex-con and inept hustler Victor Shaw is in way over his head when he blackmails a movie star. 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. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395636507
• ISBN 13: 9780395636503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 321