notanotherbookreview

Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood, Liz Taylor…Who hasn’t watched stars of old Hollywood  and wondered what it was like to get discovered in some drugstore and become a legend?  Emma Straub’s new novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (Riverhead Books) creates an imaginary star, who’s real and immensely appealing.  While movie star biographies tend to be more tease than truth,  this fiction succeeds.  Though you know the story arc, Laura Lamont delivers the pleasure of a not always charmed Hollywood life.  And you don’t feel the vague necrophilia guilt about enjoying  a dead  star’s  glamorous life. Emma Straub’s art is to make Laura’s interior life so visceral you almost feel you’re enmeshed in her luck and misfortunes, talent and delusions.  She’s a very specific character, though a familiar American archetype.  For within Laura Lamont lives Elsa Emerson, the Wisconsin farm girl with old-fashioned values....

Wilkie Collins’ BASIL, written in 1852, is all about class I read Wilkie Collins’ second novel, BASIL, not expecting a masterpiece like the THE WOMAN IN WHITE.  Yet I liked it for its comparative brevity, urgency, and shocks.  Considered a precursor to the detective story, there are telling clues only seen as important in retrospect by Basil, the narrator.  The second son of an aristocratic family whose lineage goes back to the Norman kings, at the beginning, Basil is exiled from his privileged life to the coast of Cornwall. Heartbroken with shattered nerves, Basil writes to save his life and fears it will be forfeit before he can finish. An almost demonic force threatens him and, though you think he may be crazy, you have to read on.  The story begins with his family, particularly his father, whose pride in his ancient heritage, the conviction that virtue is based on class, is pivotal to this mystery.  How Basil ruined himself is the subject of his narrati...