From Publishers Weekly
Twenty-five years in the making, this Hollywood novel by Pulitzer Prize–winner Frank (
Louise Bogan: A Portrait) is a rich meditation on family, sex, responsibility and betrayal. Dinah Lasker, happily married with two children to successful Hollywood producer-writer-director Jake Lasker, finds her world upended when she is called to testify at the HUAC hearings of the Communist-baiting 1950s. To refuse would mean her husband will be blacklisted; to comply means she must "name" her sister, the always more glamorous Veevi, an unrepentant former Communist and actress living in Paris. Dinah's decision to testify takes place early in the novel and torments her throughout the decade or so that follows, but Frank gradually reveals that "fink" Dinah is really the only decent character in town. Former friends cut her socially; Jake philanders unrepentantly; and Veevi, who is forced to move in with Dinah in Hollywood, begins an affair with Jake. Frank adopts some of the stylistic conventions of mainstream 1950s fiction to mixed effect, but she does a stupendous job of allowing the reader inside each character's self-justifying world view while placing their actions in a larger context. Dinah, far from being a simple do-gooder, is a sympathetic and complex character, and her deep love for her downward-spiraling sister and her ladder-climbing husband is as heart-wrenching as her eventual bid for independence.
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Despite her nice Hollywood life as the wife of successful screenwriter Jake Lasker, Dinah has always been overshadowed by her glitzy, beautiful sister, Veevi. Even Dinah's youthful Communist Party activities generally involved making sandwiches in the kitchen while Veevi held court among various intellectual European refugees. So when she's called to testify before the Un-American Activites Committee, naming Veevi, who is living in Europe anyway, seems a small price to pay for saving Jake's career and its associated privileges. But when her marriage collapses, Veevi comes home, and since she's on the blacklist and can't work, she's dependent on Jake and Dinah for support. Although the novel bristles with details about show business, HUAC, literary expatriates in Paris, family life in the 1950s, marital ups and downs, and more, at its heart is the complicated relationship between decent Dinah and Veevi, more potent but also toxic. Frank took 25 years to write this book, and it shows--the story is rich but also overstuffed. It's just the thing for those who would welcome a domestic saga with authentic period details and touches of Tinseltown glam, and won't be put off by the length.
Mary Ellen QuinnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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