Customer Reviews

The Movie Set

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love books about Hollywood and had been interested in reading this one for quite a long time. I had no idea it was going to be such a load of trash. The women are all doormats, the men are all thugs, and the "good guy" who is so beloved by all (especially his wife, the protagonist of the novel), is so unbelievably smarmy and manipulative that I was sick to death of him before the fifth chapter. The sad thing is that I needed to finish the book to see what happened next, even though I spent the whole time muttering under my breath about the idiocy to which I was being treated. I'm so glad it was a fast read so that I could finish it and get on to something more worth my time.

I think I could really get used to lush 1980s trash lit. It serves as a break from historical bodice ripping, but still dishes out the excess and WTFery I love so much.

The story begins with four girls meeting in their freshman year at Ohio State in 1964. They're from diverse backgrounds with different aspirations. Buffy is from Ohio, middle-class and grounded. Cleo is from suburban New Jersey, the product of the perfect marriage in the perfect home with the perfect dad. Cassie is the daughter of a control freak mother from one of California's millionaire oil boom families (and is the illegitimate daughter of Howard Hughes, though she doesn't know it). Suzannah is a hillbilly from Kentucky with aspirations to be the next greatest thing on magazine covers. (That's her on the cover.)

The narrator is Buffy, who meets Todd, her Prince Charming, in college, marries him, and has an ideal business partnership/marriage with him for years and years....until even their happy life is wreckage on the rocks of Hollywood. The other three girls go through hell and back, enter into or remain in disastrous marriages long past the point of sanity, and grab at whatever scraps of happiness they can find. By the end, though, the bad guys get their just desserts and everyone is able to turn a new page and live out their middle age with tons of experience and a good dose of hope and optimism.

This is readable trash of the best sort. Singer has a particular formula of following several female protagonists (a few of her other books are setup exactly like this one), and puts them through the meat grinder with such delight that I couldn't help but want to see what came next. While the story is told from Buffy's POV, there are scenes that revert to the 3rd person POV so we can see what's going on behind closed doors in the lives of the other girls: Cassie's doomed marriage with TV hunk Guy Savarese (who likes to cruise the Strip and nail underage tail), Suzannah's rivalry and dependence on childhood friend Poppy (who has a whole story of her own with dim-witted Elvis clone Beau Beaufort and descent into the nasty side of Vegas money and power games), and Cleo's professional status as hostess-doormat to director-husband Leo's career.

There are plenty of times I wanted to slap these women silly. They're dumb, blind, nasty, self-martyring, and generally work on a code of behavior that might as well come from Mars. Cassie in particular is a moron, so driven by the need to have her mother approve of her so that she can throw the approval in her face, that she nearly self-destructs. Buffy, who normally has her head screwed on straight, embarks on the Big Misunderstanding of all Big Misunderstandings when it comes to a perceived fling between her husband and Suzannah.

Normally I can't stand that device, and it really, really tried my patience towards the end, but Singer redeemed it by contrasting Buffy's stubborn revenge with the behavioral changes in her three college friends. All of them have moved on, accepted the bad with the good, and realized that it's not a black-and-white world, particularly when it comes to relationships. Live for love, not for hate and all that. So it did have a fine resolution at the end, although it did linger on far too long - and it loses a star for that, although it really wasn't much different than a multi-episodic non-communicative saga between two soap opera characters (like, oh, Pam and Bobby in the early seasons of Dallas). Not rage-inducing, but more like "Oh, fer Chrissakes, you ninnies!"

Now, the trashy stuff. There's rape, gang rape, bondage/humiliation, abortions, genital self-mutilation, and a scene where Poppy is tricked into screwing a bed-ridden and dying Howard Hughes for what she thinks is quid pro quo but is really a power play by a Vegas mob thug. Lemme tell ya, that scene was gross, and I loved every bit of it.

I'm so glad that I have a couple other books by Singer on the TBR. They're definitely getting read!