Customer Reviews

The Return of the Player

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

About halfway through this book I thought Tolkin had gone and nailed one to the wall and left it there for all peoples to look on in wonder, like a Shroud of LaCienega. This is a modern classic. The true word. But I for once restrained myself and finished it and about twenty pages later, page 110 to be exact, it starts to skip and then quickly descends into strange territory. You keep reading, hoping for another classic Tolkin rant but more disturbed by his veering into a personal philosophy that reads like a mix of Robert McKee and Star Jones Reynolds. That everyone operates in the vocabulary of the journey of the hero is a good and amusing concient. When he plays it off as newspeak it has an ache and a rightness you can feel, but when people start spouting this stuff as the truth writ large you get the feeling tolkin means it all. And the instant that happens, the characters go from real to motorized authorial mouthpieces. Also, Tolkin interjects a pages long business plan that put me into a stupor I had not experienced since Paul Auster laid out the rules for the card game he had developed as a young author...

That said, nobody can write speeches like this man and the book is worth buyiing just for the raw energy of the first half, when the characters zip around Hollywood and the internet with the kind of period detail and accuracy you rarely get anywhere. This is a very well observed book... but it would have been nice if the journey of the hero did not so closely resemble the freak out of the nutball.

THE RETURN OF THE PLAYER probably should have never happened: it's a sequel to a good book which was made into a terrific movie which achieved a certain mobius-strip-eating-its-own-tail iconography. If I'd known about this before it was published, I'm sure I would have wished the writer (or publisher?) would just leave well enough alone.

But Tolkin is shrewd (his two movies are fine stuff, and AMONG THE DEAD is deadly cynical but very, very sharp); he certainly had a viable continuing arc for his lead, Griffin Mill, and for about three fourths of this book, things are rolling along surprisingly well. There are a couple of narrative and character bumps -- mainly with "June," and that problem may be because I'm thinking of Greta Scacchi's indelible "June" in the Altman film rather than the one Tolkin put on page and has full rights to, the movie be damned.

But things are rolling along fine and the book is very well-plotted until, almost literally, Tolkin's character gets his soapbox. Suddenly, the authoral voice becomes overwhelming, and his sharp, observational eye -- more hit than miss -- becomes more editorial in nature, and the book never quite recovers. The final pages are a good idea which would have been, perhaps, supremely satisfying if Tolkin hadn't left the station without the reader for perhaps thirty or more pages of eye-glazing wtf.

The book suffers a bit from a sort of plot device which deeply weakens the main female characters, and, in fact, comes off as a primal male fantasy teetering on the misogynistic. No doubt the very wealthy can afford to realize many fantasies, but that's not how this one is set up, and so the development feels grafted rather than organic. Male fantasy? Liberal finger-in-the-face-of-morality? One suspects these motivations rather than anything more noble or pure.

Too bad. I was surprisingly, delightfully won over for quite a stretch, there.

A more precise grade would be 2 1/2 out of 5.

Fans of Michael Tolkin's 1988 novel THE PLAYER and the 1992 Robert Altman film based on that story will greet the return of its antihero Griffin Mill with enthusiasm, while new readers will find themselves engaged by this entertaining black comedy set in the surreal world of present-day Hollywood.

Having literally gotten away with murder in THE PLAYER, one might think that 52-year-old Griffin Mill would be grateful to be a free man, recommending scripts for new movies in his $1.5 million-a-year studio executive job and living with his former mistress, Lisa, now his wife and mother of his third child. Instead, he's tormented by the implosion of his net worth to a mere $6 million in the dotcom bust, and his vanished libido, made even more troubling by his allergy to Viagra. He's also haunted by a free-floating malaise that oscillates between the poles of personal anxiety and worry about mankind's slide toward inevitable catastrophe. "This is it?" he muses, reflecting on the emptiness of his life. "Right turns on red light, homework, some kind of accommodation with death, some kind of theology to overcome envy, some kind of gesture in the direction of making the world better, a little charity, and, other than that, trying not to let your bad feelings spoil someone else's day or --- not anything so remote as a day --- a minute, a moment."

In desperation, Griffin hatches a scheme to ingratiate himself with Phil Ginsberg, a mysterious self-made media entrepreneur and "the most purely frightening person Griffin knew in Hollywood." Ginsberg suffers from his own financial angst: he wants to turn a fortune of a mere $750 million into a meaningful $4 billion so that, if he chooses, he can "buy ten fighter jets and make war on Guatemala." Griffin attracts his attention by making an extravagant and nearly unaffordable gift to the private school fundraising campaign Ginsberg is spearheading and shows he's even willing to kill again to achieve his goals.

But instead of offering Griffin a conventional job, Ginsberg gives him an enigmatic secretary and places a rocking chair in an office with no phone, no computer, not even a desk. "I want you to think about things that I can't even imagine," he says. "I want you to look at your life, your own life, as the life of the world." He encourages Griffin to bring to bear his movie world experience to "look for a story," hoping that Griffin will help him find a "bruised business" he can transform into a source of vast wealth for both of them.

Meanwhile, Griffin's home life is unraveling even faster than his professional one. He fantasizes about sex with his ex-wife, June, who visits Goth dance clubs and flirts with Mormonism. And he's forced to deal with the consequences of Lisa's titanic meltdown when their daughter Willa throws a temper tantrum during a routine shopping trip. The episode threatens to derail Griffin's budding career and inspires June to propose a new domestic arrangement that, despite its oddity, somehow brings about marital harmony.

For all his faults, Griffin is a surprisingly sympathetic protagonist. His first foray into the world of entrepreneurial capitalism is discouraging, but it's hard not to root for the kind of happy ending that was a staple of the Hollywood scripts he'd been reading for a quarter century. While it's debatable whether or not the results of Griffin's efforts are truly earned, they're consistent with the rules governing a world that's sharply observed and skillfully portrayed in this novel.

Tolkin resists the temptation of some satirists to take potshots at easy targets, yet he's not afraid to paint a broad comic picture when it's warranted. Among such portraits, the "Fiddler on the Roof" themed bar mitzvah of Ginsberg's son --- the highlight of which is a speech by the bar mitzvah boy that is without parallel in the annals of Judaism --- is full of outrageous humor.

The ending of THE RETURN OF THE PLAYER, featuring a delightful cameo by a politician well known for his Hollywood connections, provides ample fodder for a sequel that, if it's written someday, no doubt will please Tolkin's readers as this novel will do. It will be fun to watch Tolkin bring his satirical sensibility to bear on a profession even riper for skewering than Hollywood: the world of big-time politics.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg [...]

This sequel to The Player follows in the tradition of such 19th century novelists as Dostoevsky or George Eliot, as Michael Tolkin fashions a dead-on moral tale of the high-end lives of the Hollywood rich and powerful. Griffin Mill is back. He's 52 now, and down to his last $6 million, he's almost broke. Carrying a guilty secret, he's still capable of ruthlessly doing what is necessary to get ahead. Tolkin is a terrific writer. This book isn't just about Hollywood. It shows us what's rotten about money-lusting America.

Tolkin's earlier book, "The Player," was a whithering satire with writing on the level of a Budd Schulberg or Nathaniel West. Alas, "Return" starts out with the intelligence and bite of its predecessor, but soon spirals steadily downward. The cynical world view that initially makes the book riveting ends up corrupting the writer and his narrative. The Return of The Player reads like it's written for about five people. If you don't live in L.A., know the industry and aren't liberal, you shouldn't bother. I'm surprised that a guy with Tolkin's grounding in "story" would make this mistake. In essence, "Return" suffers from the self-obession of its protagonist, Griffen Mill. The book also reflects, to an unappealing degree, Tolkin's own envy-awe-and-loathing of people with money. It spends a lot of time trying to sound insider-ish about life in wealth's upper stratosphere. But the descriptions and characterizations are so over-the-top they come off ultimately as unsophisticated. And then, as some here have noted, the ending seems suddenly tacked on -- with no connection whatsover to what has come before. It's almost like Tolkin got bored with his book and rushed to finish -- and so does the reader.

I loved the movie and really enjoyed the first book (though on a second read recently wasn't as impressed as I had been originally). But this book was painful to read. The characters were not believable. The story went nowhere. Tolkin seemed to use the space to rant about every topic he could think of. And, in the end when Bill Clinton joins, it was simply ridiculous. Don't bother with this book. What a disappointment

If you live in Los Angeles, you must read this book NOW. And then you'll have to leave. One hit with a bullet. Anyone who doesn't love this book doesn't know Los Angeles. End of story. Michael Tolkin: we are not worthy. Ignore the assembled idiots. You know what you've done is mighty.

Griffin Mill has come along way since that last scene in "The Player" where he drives up to the waiting (and pregnant) June Gudmundsdottir at their quintessential happy ending Hollywood movie home. Mills waves to June as he talks on his car phone about "the best movie ever made" in reference to his murdering a screenwriter and not getting caught. In "The Return of The Player" Griffin's life has evolved to a unique love triangle complicated with Griffin's children from both mothers, a movie mogul where the rewards and toys have exponentially increased, and a new level of paranoia where global warming is the least of our worries. His secret act of murder in "The Player" continues to complicate his life. I read this sequel with the movie's "The Player" characters in mind trying to picture how Robert Altman will shoot it. The book was fun to read; the movie will be even more fun to watch.

This rather facile sequel by Tolkin is a quick and easy read, equivalent to an aerosol can of air to clean your computer keyboard. Nothing's in there. The story is totally ridiculous, and contains none of the Hollywood insider insight and parody in The Player. If I were to tell you that it's a happy ever after, live with two wives, and go from studio mogul to the president of the United States, would you believe me?

I did not read The Player but really enjoyed the movie. So, based upon the great newspaper write-ups I anxiously awaited this book. Griffin is down to his last $6 million as a studio executive with an unhappy 40ish trophy wife when he realizes his executive days may be over. Somehow the initiative to donate $750,000 to be close to a near billionaire works and suddenly his strange journey begins. But under weird circumstances and is there another murder in his closet?

What starts as a Hollywood whodunit converts to a philisopical journey to a dead end. Does Griffin once again win out to higher stakes? And how about this mess of a family? Read this book at your own risk. The pace and set-up is excellent and then it drops into the abyss with minor peaks and not enough action to make it worth the read.

Loved The Player. Trust me, The Player has NOT returned.