I Was Howard Hughes: A Novel [Paperback]

Steven Carter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2003

Part Great Gatsby, part This Is Spinal Tap, Steven Carter's hilarious debut paints a fictional portrait of a biographer, his notorious subject, and the illusions we hold about fame and fortune.

Howard Hughes embodied the American dream: envied by powerful men, desired by beautiful women, Hughes lived his life larger than all who surrounded him and yet died an emaciated recluse.

This makes him the perfect subject for red-hot biographer Alton Reece. Riding high on the wave of previous astonishing successes, Reece sees Hughes as more than simply a name worth the seven-figure advance he's demanding from his publisher. He finds in Hughes a kindred spirit of greatness, a man misunderstood and beaten down by jealous inferiors. But even as Reece struggles to "know" his subject, his own rapidly unraveling life keeps finding unexpected ways to intrude.

With a deft comic touch and an astounding narrative style, Steven Carter's novel creates a picture of a Hughes that might have been, a biographer that can't separate his subject from his own visions of grandeur, and a public that demands its heroes be larger than life-if only so they can be more easily torn down.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Carter offers a cheeky look at the relationship between biographer and subject in his sly debut novel about an unconventional, egotistical author who takes on a Howard Hughes book project and finds himself identifying with his bizarre subject as his own existence begins to crumble in a disturbingly similar fashion. Aldon Reece is the biographer whose agent talks him into doing a book about Hughes, modeled after Reece's unconventional portrait of Herman Melville in Melville and the Whale, an offbeat unexpected bestseller. In his introduction, Reece offers some snide comments about being snubbed for a significant book award, then launches into his account of Hughes's life, using the same strange format he employed with the Melville bio. An odd, ponderous collection of (mostly fictional) quotes by and about Hughes is followed by an extended chapter on Hughes's relationships with the likes of Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn as well as his marriage to Jean Peters. As Reece transcribes his own interviews with earlier biographers, revelations begin to surface that betray his arrogant sense of superiority and then a Hughes-like penchant for paranoia when he is faced with setbacks. Carter does a nice job of contrasting Reece's neuroses with the over-the-top Hughes material, which focuses mostly on the early years when Hughes established himself as an aviation mogul before his various eccentricities surfaced. The author deserves credit for developing an unconventional conceit that seems quite limited on the surface, turning this into an unusual, entertaining commentary on the nature of celebrity and creating a dizzying hall-of-mirrors effect with its double portrait.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This is a work of extraordinary humor and pathos."-Frederick Barthelme"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (September 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582343756
• ISBN-13: 978-1582343754
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,172,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #81 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( H ) > Hughes, Howard

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Picaresque collection of interrelated stories, interviews", September 23, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: I Was Howard Hughes: A Novel (Paperback)

Author Steven Carter gives the Howard Hughes legend a new treatment here, creating a fictional biographer, Alton Reece, to tell a fictional story about this real man, using as sources an invented and entirely fictional bibliography. The fictional Reece interviews Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Jean Peters, and other Hughes contacts, filling the novel with detail as he personalizes the reclusive Hughes. All the interviews, notes from Hughes's "diary," quotations by Richard Nixon, memos by an FBI field agent, transcripts of tape recordings, and comments by Hughes's former employees are imaginative and often hilarious creations of the author, not real at all. Although some readers may question the propriety of basing the entire "biography" on invented quotations purportedly made by real people, the book is clearly label as fiction, and the basic information about Hughes's life is largely factual.

Modesty, self-effacement, and humility are not biographer Reece's strong suits, as we note from the opening pages. His first book, Melville and the Whale, was successful, and, he tells us, he secured a seven figure advance for the Hughes biography. His assistants do the "tedious aspects of research," he doesn't get along with people at the Hughes Archives, and he accepts money from Fox TV, though, ultimately, things don't "work out." He likens his experience with the prestigious MacArthur Foundation to "dealing with a seventeenth-century French king handing out Christmas Lagniappes." As Reece recreates the downward spiral of Hughes's life, from the Hollywood days, through his confrontations with Bugsy Siegel, and to his use of a double to confuse the U.S. Government, the reader notes a parallel deterioration in Reece's own life.

For anyone intrigued with the Howard Hughes story, this novel provides some unique, albeit fictional, glimpses into what might have been Hughes's thinking and into events which might have shaped his decisions. Humor, much of it slapstick, keeps the reader grounded in (fictional) reality, however much Hughes and Reece might be losing their touch, and as the novel comes to a wonderfully ironic close and author Steven Carter has the last laugh, even the most jaded reader will laugh along with him. Mary Whipple

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Heartbreaking Work That Staggers Some Geniuses, October 1, 2003

By 

Jake Aumont (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Was Howard Hughes: A Novel (Paperback)

Smart, eccentric, and by turns hilarious, Carter's first novel is more compelling and accomplished than at least ninety percent of the mouthy, self-referential, post-postmodern drivel that fills the pages of McSweeney's and passes for literary "art" these days. Melding fact and fiction into one cohesive story, Carter resurrects a number of American icons--Hughes, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, Bugsy Seigel, to name a few--but without the hardboiled punchiness of James Ellroy or the mechanical syntax of Don DeLillo. In this extremely impressive debut, Carter weaves together a multiplicity of voices without missing a beat. Most impressive is Carter's ability to channel the quirkiness of both Hughes and his shady biographer without turning them into one-dimensional jokes. A timely release given the forthcoming Hughes biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. Read the book of one master storyteller (Carter, or should I say Alton Reece?), then watch the film of another!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the time and space of howard hughes and his shadow, March 26, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: I Was Howard Hughes: A Novel (Paperback)

This book offers an intoxicating immersion into the world of Howard Hughes and his imaginary biographer, Alton Reece. As a former aerospace employee, I was highly interested in the details author Steven Carter wove into his tight, dazzling narrative. Anyone who has driven by the Westside and South Bay area of LA should realize what rich turf Hughes lived in, including the airplane factories that dotted and still grace the landscape (if you know where to drive). This book creates a small gem of a world that reflects the larger intellectual possibilities that Hughes once embodied, and sadly, lost along with his fiction biographer Reece.