Little Known Facts: A Novel Paperback – February 18, 2014

This is a great concept. What is life like for a world famous movie star? Or his ex-wife? Or his grown children? Or his twentysomething girlfriend.

Most of us who have watched the Academy Awards have wondered what are those smiling perfect-looking people really like. And what is it like to live in a family where your father’s brilliance puts everyone else in shadows.

This story is told from multiple points-of-view. Each family member, plus a few ex-wives, girl friends and random employees offer their perspective. The approach has some advantages as we can see characters from multiple points of view. There are some great chapters, with excellent writing. One of the best being the chapter told by a stagehand who is caught stealing a personal item of the star. But some of the chapters seem rushed – long first person narratives that try to cover too much ground.

Little Known Facts was fun to read – well-paced and easy to turn the pages. But I think the story is spread too thin for such a short novel. It is very much a slice of life story, with not much arc. I didn’t want a Hollywood ending, but I wanted something more.

Christine's Sneed's Little Known Facts has been much celebrated for its innovative structure, its insight into the inner workings of what we call Hollywood, its subtlety of character, its sly poignant humor, perhaps above all its deconstruction of celebrity culture. The novel is one of the literary events of 2013, and its reputation keeps growing. Sneed writes in eleven different voices. What they all have in common is their relationship to one of those preternatural human beings all of us hear about but few, if any, of us are. Renn Ivins, not the protagonist but the object of everyone else's obsessions, is an actor of Harrison Ford - Clint Eastwood - Robert Redford calibre. As one reviewer put it, he may be closer to George Clooney if George Clooney were married with two children. Renn is not just an actor. He's every bit as accomplished in directing and screenwriting. He would have no idea how to fail, even if he tried.

If the book has a central plot thread, it's the relationship between Renn and his two children Anna and Billy, especially the latter. Renn and Billy have an Oedipal conflict that at times becomes uncomfortable. Billy lusts after Renn's young girlfriend, a Jennifer Lawrence - Jessica Chastain type of meteoric superstar. Renn, meanwhile, manages to have an affair with BIlly's ex even as he's still involved with the actress younger than his daughter. Speaking of his daughter, she is a bold character stroke on Sneed's part, because she appears to be the most "together" person in the book - a bright, attractive charming physician-in-waiting, but in fact falls into the deepest slough when she hooks up with one of her attending physicians, a man who outdoes even her father in narcissism. Other voices are Renn's hilarious second wife, who is writing a delicious tell-all memoir, his physician first wife, his two current girlfriends, a knockabout prop man who is a wannabe screenwriter, and Renn Ivins himself. Renn's voice is insufferably pompous, viewing his career, his wives, girlfriends, and children from a lofty perch intended to make Renn look good after his death, rather like Richard Burton's diaries. Sneed interveaves all these voices to paint a devastating picture of contemporary culture in the age of social media. People like Renn Ivins are not just larger than life. They become a kind of alternative life for millions who can't escape his orbit no matter how hard they try - just look at Renn's first wife Lucy, who at long last gets delivered from bondage to Renn in the last chapter, but who has lived the 15 years or so since her divorce in a kind of shadowland.

Little Known Facts is a book that stays with you long after you've read it, because it says so much about the times in which we live and is so discerning, in a kind of Proustian way, about what relationships are like and how they change over time. It seems to me quite a leap beyond Sneed's excellent story collection Portraits of A Few of the People I've Made Cry. I can only imagine what she'll come up with next.

You might wonder why Christine Sneed titled her novel Little Known Facts. Sounding like an encyclopedia that children could use to trip up their teachers, it might not seem like a book you would pick up and read. But take a chance on it. You will not be disappointed. It is clear-eyed, witty, and acutely insightful. Here are the first lines from the first paragraph: "More times than he would care to count, Will has witnessed his father's ability to silence a room merely by entering it. He has seen his father's expression change in an instant from utter exhaustion to the bright, sometimes false pleasure of being the center of attention, the person on whom every pair of eyes is fastened, some with desire, others with envy."

The man at the center of attention is Renn Ivins, the Hollywood superstar around which his son Will, his daughter Anna, and his ex-wife Lucy orbit. We get to know Renn from their perspectives, as they parcel out little known facts not only about him but also about themselves and their relationships with each other. Through them, we discover they are not the only ones captivated by the centripetal force of celebrity, but it is they--Will, Anna, and Lucy--who create the dynamic that unfolds in each chapter until, finally, they escape his claustrophobic Harrison Ford stardom.

The dynamic always involves women--Renn's women. There is the pairing of Will and Danielle until Danielle breaks up with Will and she and Renn find their way to each other. There is the pairing of Renn and Elise, a beautiful actress to whom he is engaged--only she is twenty-some years younger than he. There is the pairing of Will and Elise, who fall for each other though she can't seem to break off with Renn until Renn has an affair with Will's ex-girlfriend Danielle and Will falls in love with a Parisian woman. There is the pairing of Anna and Dr. Glass, "one of the attendings for her internal medicine rotations," and old enough to be her father--a no, no if ever there was one. There is the pairing of Renn and his second ex-wife Michelle Byers, who gives away the store about who Renn really is. Only no one wants to believe the little known facts in her tell-all book. And then, finally, there is the pairing of Lucy and Michael, old friends from USC who coincidentally meet three decades later. This is how Lucy, the medical doctor, describes their chance encounter: "Now, three decades later, Michael appeared before me one morning a few weeks ago when I was at a bagel place on Colorado Boulevard where I sometimes buy a cup of coffee on my way to work."

Each chapter builds on itself until the dysfunctional Renn Ivers' family comes into focus at the end. Whether it is the rudderless twenty-six-year old son Will who travels to Paris, falls in love, and writes a screenplay; or the ambitious, steadfast medical student Anna who is about to upend her life; or the admirable doctor wife Lucy who finds happiness with a man she knew long ago--these are the believable characters who are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the father/husband they can't seem to escape.

Sneed knows how to tell an irresistible story of fame and fortune and the dysfunction coursing through it, but she tells it without the derision that so often accompanies such a tale. Rather, Sneed draws her characters with an authenticity that is both admirable and revealing. And she does it with a sincerity that does not slip into caricature.

Takes a while to get interesting but it really has some good points exposing celebrity worship so common these days. So true, all that glitters is not gold. I think it is even worse then this book explains. Hence, all the suicide, addiction and need for rehab amongst celebrities. The book doesn't even delve into the spiritual darkness of Hollywood, which is so prevalent and seems to not even touch this family. That aspect would have taken this novel to a whole different level or down to a whole different level as the case may be!