Summer reading

Our critics spotlight the season's cheap (and not so cheap) thrills and single out a few bestselling stinkers (paging Jackie Collins!).

By Salon's critics

Jul 16, 2001 | Here at Salon, where we abide by the apparently heretical policy of only recommending books we actually enjoy, we believe that if you're not reading for pleasure, then you better be getting paid for it. But since we get paid to read anyway, things can get a little mixed up, and just to be on the safe side, once a year -- in the summer, naturally -- we check in with the books that everyone else is buying in stacks. Hence, our Summer Reading special.

It's a mixed bag, from outright stinkers like "Hollywood Wives" (what gives, America?) to middlingly tasty snacks such as Rae Lawrence's resuscitation of Jacqueline Susann's classic trash goddesses to the unalloyed delights of the new Janet Evanovich romp. Plus, we've added an assortment of lightweight gems that might otherwise be overlooked in the crush of new books designed to make your hours in the airplane seat zip by like minutes or to distract you from the sensation of UVA radiation roasting the backs of your thighs. We've got everything: sassy female FBI agents, voodoo priestesses, crooked unions, Sicilian vendettas, a smelly elephant brain -- Hey! How'd that get in here? Anyway, we present the following in hope that our reading pleasure will soon become yours.

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Hollywood Wives: The New Generation
By Jackie Collins
Simon & Schuster, 528 pages

It should come as no great shock that Jackie Collins' "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation" lacks in prose style what it fails to make up for in plot and character. Harder to figure is the near-absence of elaborate sex scenes featuring ice cubes and horsewhips, and the dearth of the scheming spouses promised in the title. Aside from two dim tertiary characters, there is exactly one wife here, and she's too busy trying to get her own career off the ground to hang around the central plot. If summer camp memories serve, Jackie Collins is no Sidney Sheldon.

What "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation" does offer is plenty of encouragement to writers who dream of writing a bestselling Hollywood roman ` clef, but worry about lacking the insider status to pull it off. With a love of italics and a subscription to People magazine, anyone can do it. This story centers around a single-named star who falls for her private detective-cum-bodyguard as smelly men plot to kidnap her full-lipped daughter, who is vacillating between her mama's-boy boyfriend and his evil twin (who turns out to be the good guy) on the eve of her marriage. You can't use this plot of course, but any other episode of "All My Children" will do.

Then just nestle a few love notes to real-life celebrities in random passages, making it appear as though you know them. Name a character "Ramone Lopez," for example, and write: "Ramone Lopez -- no relation to the exquisite Jennifer." Aspiring authors should also learn from Collins' mistakes. One character's power marriage is undone by her habit of fellating her director-husband's protigi, a young screenwriter named "Oliver Rock." This, of course, is ridiculous: In Hollywood no one ever sleeps with the writer.

Finally, liberal use of rhetorical questions should make writing a Collinsesque novel as simple as solving a crime in a Collins novel. Note how Fanny, a detective "of great repute" achieves her goals.

Eric ... the name stuck in Fanny's mind. She had a strong suspicion that he might be the man she was looking for. Now all she had to do was find out where he lived, and she'd bring him in for questioning. That shouldn't be too hard, should it?

Nope.

-- Carina Chocano

Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls
By Rae Lawrence
Crown Publishers, 320 pages

What made Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" so overwhelming was not just the trashy, soap-opera-on-acid spectacle she created, but the fast, crude language she used to tell her story of three young women starting out in the entertainment industry, their successes and their humiliating, at times tragic, failures. Susann wrote without grace, all tell and no show: no establishing scenes, no artful foreshadowing, no complex psychological portraits. She was too busy debauching her characters to develop them.

And it still makes for visceral, wildly entertaining reading that relies as much on her natural sense of dramatic pacing as it does her artless, and utterly realistic, voice, the crude, frank jargon that sounds nothing if not believable. The "Valley" women -- the archetypal "good girl," Anne Welles, the archetypal "bad girl," Neely O'Hara, the archetypal "sweet, dumb girl," Jennifer North -- have held up well; contemporary cautionary tales in the movies or on TV still rarely make their young heroines descend to the depths Susann sent her girls to back in the mid-1960s. And so it's only natural for anyone who suffered along with and/or delighted in their own youthful debasement to want to find out whatever actually happened to Neely and Anne (as opposed to poor Jennifer, of course, who died so very tragically).

Rae Lawrence's "Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls" will offer "Valley" fans a quick fix, picking up with the girls in 1987, in their early 30s, and we follow them as they struggle through blasi midlife crises -- Anne finally leaves that rascally Lyon Burke (that's right, she ended up marrying him!); Neely tries a career revival in the kitsch backwater of Las Vegas; Anne goes from poorhouse to successful party-planner to big-name TV news star in the time it must take Katie Couric to wear out a pair of Jimmy Choos; Neely goes off drugs, picks up with Lyon, goes back on drugs, gets dropped by Lyon, stages a major theatrical comeback, and on, and on.

It's delivered, though, without Susann's vicious bite, and falls to the trash novel conventions "Valley" employed but didn't seem tied to (an engagement is canceled at the last minute; a character you forgot about returns unrecognized due to massive facial surgery). But it's also hindered by the jaded tastes of a post-"Dallas," post-"Melrose Place," "Sex and the City" culture that takes a lot to titillate. When aging lothario Lyon (roar!) echoes one of the famous passages from the first book and orders a 40-something Neely, "Tonight it's going to be my way ... Turn over," it seems less deliciously sordid than just sort of pathetic.

Still, it can be an amusing trip down memory lane, with the occasional funny tidbit -- Xanax, for example, has largely replaced Valium as the "doll" of choice -- though the image of these women, replaying the same mistakes they made in their 20s, inevitably tarnishes the memory of them as the defiled but undaunted heroines they once seemed to be.

-- Kerry Lauerman

Next Page: Janet Evanovich, an elephant brain and a daring World War II rescue

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