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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Picaresque collection of interrelated stories, interviews", September 23, 2003
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
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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
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!
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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 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.
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