Portnoy, Herzog, Zuckerman, shove over! Famous filmmaker Larry Lazar has come to pray with you at Temple Self-Absorption, that literary shul where every day is Yom Kippur and every relationship a con. His lament, repeated over and over in Josh Greenfeld's "The Return of Mr. Hollywood," is a model of neurotic rationalization. "I'm an artist," chants Larry Lazar in explanation for all his sins. "I deal with real reality."
Larry Lazar (Mister Hollywood to his estranged mother, a pompous creep to just about everyone else) has discovered that his middle-aged life is a mess. "Herbie and Miltie," his most recent "personal" film, is not selling popcorn, and nobody is interested in his latest existential vision: a picture about a film director who seduces his exlover's daughter. Grotesquely obsessed with his age, weight and place in the all-time film pantheon, this Sunset Strip Narcissus barely quivers when he learns his despised mother -- a Sophie Portnoy clone with a Moms Mabley vocabulary -- has died in Brooklyn. Heading home, he tells himself that as an artist he must be true to his feelings about the shrew. Mr. Hollywood will not cry.
He should. Back in New York, Mr. Hollywood finds nothing but the wreckage from a torpedoed past. Old lovers want their old presents returned; new lovers want their new scripts produced. Even the star-struck rabbi at Lazar's mother's funeral ("I performed the ceremony for David Begelman's second wife's first marriage") would rather talk movies than console. Running from the past, Lazar careens through his old neighborhoods in a three-day binge of drugs, sex and sniveling The suns of Jewish mothers and the sins of Hollywood directors have been dealt with before in loftier terms, but rarely with the slashing with that Greenfeld, who has worked as a Hollywood screenwriter ("Harry and Tonto"), bestows upon them. Eventually, the laughs die down a bit as Larry Lazar learns that no man is an auteur--that in life, unlike film, the best things come from collaboration. Back in Lotus Land, Mr. Hollywood finally faces real reality. He cries.
While Larry Lazar comes across as a neurotic gerbil, Western film director Wes Hardin, the protagonist of Rudolph Wurlitzer's "Slow Fade," jumps out at the reader like a riled rattlesnake. Seventy-year-old Hardin, his mind and body creased by more than 30 movies, decades of critical acclaim, four wives and untold cases of tequila, has been shunted aside by the Hollywood money boys. Swilling booze and spitting venom, Wes begins rummaging through his memory for one final story on which to hang his decaying reputation and spirit.
The last untold tale that interests Hardin concerns his neglected daughter's disappearance into the ashrams of India. His equally neglected son has returned alone and silent after going to look for her. Information about her fate will come at a price -- the price of a screenplay, written by the son about the daughter. Intrigued, Wes dishes out thousands for each installment of the script. Is his daughter dead or alive? Is he actually going to make a movie out of this?
Wurlitzer (whose own Hollywood work includes the script for Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") has crafted a bleak panorama in which greed, lust and revenge are the only motivations that roust his characters from their motel-room beds and into the painful light of day. Seeing the geniuses and dealmakers in this stylish, malignant novel strike up the dance of death, one is reminded of Nathanael West's locusts -- "those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence." West was referring to the watchers of the Hollywood illusions; in the worlds of Wes Hardin and Larry Lazar, the illusion makers are equally victimized.