If Emma Straub were pitching her book to Hollywood, she'd have a ready-made, if optimistic, log line: " 'The Last Tycoon' meets 'A Star Is Born.' " Both Fitzgerald's unprepared novel about Hollywood's Golden Age as well as a movie with Judy Garland as an ingnue remade for a shade cast overwhelming shadows over "Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures," Straub's delicately celebrated initial novel about fame, family drama as well as personal identity.
Sarah Shatz
Emma Straub
LAURA LAMONT'S LIFE IN PICTURES
By Emma Straub
306 pp. Riverhead Books. $ 26.95.
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Emma Straub Becomes a Movie Star (September 30, 2012)
Ambitious in scope, a story ranges over five decades of an actress's life, beginning in 1929 when small Elsa Emerson of Wisconsin is preoccupied by a summer theater her relatives run in their barn. But complacency is disrupted by a family tragedy. A teenage Elsa flees to Hollywood as well as only like in a cinema becomes Laura Lamont, an Oscar-winning star of a late '30s as well as '40s. Elsa/Laura has dual marriages initial a troubled a singular to a small-timeactor, afterwards a swooningly halcyon a singular to a brilliant college of music executive as well as three children, but eventually her career tumbles so low she's marked down to you do a television diversion show.
The novel's enchanting concept plays to a informative yearning to counterpart at a back of a movie screen, as well as Straub keeps her account moving, filling it with vivid details. Counterintuitively, a college of music dyes Laura's blond hair dark;! which b ecomes a heading she can never afford to lose. At a tallness of her fame, if she sets foot in a grocery store, "the total place would proceed to pierce in slow motion, . . . whispers swelling around a store like brush fire."
Yet whilst drive-in theatre conclude Laura as well as this book, a most credible scenes deal with her second marriage. Pregnant as well as miserably artificial with her self-absorbed husband, Elsa goes to a party as well as meets her soon-to-be-next husband, Irving Green. He's a powerful executive of a college of music which has a spirit of MGM about it but closely resembles Warner Brothers run by Louis Gardner, it's called Gardner Brothers right down to a iconic H2O building on a lot. Irving sees a star potential underneath Elsa's diffidence as well as her awkward married name, Pitts. "Laura Lamont," he says. "You wish it? It's yours," becoming different her hold up with a few words. Beneath a stock Hollywood scene, a malleable Elsa is falling in love.
Elsa is partly an hommage to Esther Blodgett of "A Star Is Born," but a novel is even more in debt to Fitzgerald. The short, physically thin Hollywood genius Irving Green mirrors a real-life Irving Thalberg, who inspired Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr. Straub's epigraph from "The Last Tycoon" cuts away from a passage so which it ends by saying Hollywood can be understood "only dimly as well as in flashes," sensitively saving a subsequent sentence for her novel. One of Fitzgerald's most fast lines, "Not half a dozen group have ever been able to keep a total equation of cinema in their heads," becomes Straub's bland observation about Hollywood success: "It all fully cooked down to an equation, a singular as well complex for Elsa to imagine."
And there, with all a echoes as well as clunky allusions, lies a novel's nagging flaw. Despite a writerly strengths, "Laura Lamont" feels rote, with a ardour of a smart, responsible student's homework. It says nothing substantial or new about a dim underside of luminary! we're a lot reduction astounded than a brave woman which luminary fades or about split identities. Elsa as well as Laura combine until she realizes, as well as Straub states as well bluntly, "It seemed impossible to fit all a people she'd ever been into a singular body."
Straub's strong recent story collection, "Other People We Married," includes surprisingly irritated characters as well as astonishing twists. As it struggles to escape a weight of a sources, "Laura Lamont" reminds us which there is an alchemical component to any Hollywood equation: a trace of sorcery which makes investigate come to life.
Caryn James writes a James on Screens movie as well as television blog for Indiewire as well as is a author of a novels "Glorie" as well as "What Caroline Knew."
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