The Bones
By Seth Greenland (Bloomsbury, $24.95)
Susan Greenland
Scribe Greenland.
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Frank Bones is a stand-up comic committed to the noble old idea of humor as danger. Maybe that's why he's still, at a not-well-preserved 48, a "road monkey," smoking blunts and drunk-driving his crummy Caddy to backwater clubs like Gigglemeister's and the Snicker Shack. (Those gigs he precedes by peeing out windows into open convertibles and impulsively punctuates by whipping out a pistol and taking potshots at hecklers.) "The Bones," as he royally refers to himself, envies the erstwhile Boswell who once crashed on his couch, former SoHo Weekly News scribe Lloyd Melnick, now improbably transmogrified into a Los Angeles TV comedy-writing veteran of the Seinfeld-like Fleishman Show who gets $10 million–plus for running his own new shows.
Will Lloyd succumb to the Bones' demand to rewrite his last-chance "apocalyptic- spaghetti-noir" sitcom about an Eskimo who rides a walrus? Will the Bones succumb to the demand of his girlfriend, Honey Call (star of the oft-downloaded soft-core porn classic Hot Ninja Bounty Hunters), to get Lloyd to hire her as the Eskimo's nose- nuzzling sweetheart, "the temptress of the tundra"? Can self-loathing Lloyd escape the Bones, Honey, his industry bosses, and his social-climbing wife and ditch his $8,000-a-month Brentwood manse and new show Happy Endings (about a massage parlor featuring nudie cuties cavorting in Jell-O hot tubs) so he can write his neotranscendentalist novel?
The answers are both elusive and predictable in this debut novel by a Hollywood comedy writer. Seth Greenland's quirky plot goes where you'd expect—the easy terrain of showbiz satire—and then veers off into picaresque crime-fiction pastiche that runs out of gas. But Greenland is chucklably witty in dozens of passages, alive to verbal music, rhythmically gifted, and exceedingly knowing in skewering his fellow show folk. Some of the roman à clef characters are so easy to identify, they're like Kerouac's friends in his books, given transparent new names that Kerouac called "funny hats." Gee, what former dirty dancer could this possibly be? "Dede Green [who] years ago had starred in a successful teen-angst picture as the not-so-pretty girl who finds love, then promptly got a nose job, making herself both unrecognizable and uncastable, since her offbeat charm had rested in her asymmetrical, slightly cubist features."
Greenland isn't a good novelist yet, but he's a real writer, well worth watching. Even when there's no screen in sight. TIM APPELO
Seth Greenland will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Tues., March 22.
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
By Philip Short (Henry Holt, $32.50)
The whole of 1970s Cambodia's horrors has been ripe for a smart book for a long time. After all, as soon as Americans pulled out of Vietnam and our puppet government in Phnom Penh fell, Cambodia turned into the killing fields, where 1 million to 2 million Cambodians (depending on whose numbers you trust) were executed, worked to death in rice fields, or left to die from disease and starvation. It made, and still makes, little sense. Unlike the other holocausts of the last century—in Armenia, Europe, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia—where the deadly impulse was driven by fanatics seeking to ethnically cleanse their homeland, in Cambodia it was Cambodians killing other Cambodians. The massive fratricide resulted from the mutant communist ideology of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and others, who demanded that the educated and business classes of the country had to be destroyed—along with just about anyone else who was perceived to be a problem. Pol Pot and company, who ruled from 1975 to 1979, wanted an agrarian version of the workers' paradise—everyone to the rice fields, children included, in a race to make the country self-sufficient and closed off from the outside world. Three decades later, the project still seems like it was concocted and enforced by aliens.
That's the bizarre netherworld and amazing story into which Philip Short plunges. You'd be right to expect an intense and intriguing tale. But Short, who wrote the well-regarded 2000 biography Mao: A Life, falls flat here. His years of research, interviews with some of the principals, and access to original sources, sadly, result in a book that is at times a disjointed history lesson but rarely the kind of book that's a must-read. PHILIP DAWDY
The Chrysanthemum Palace
By Bruce Wagner (Simon & Schuster, $23)
For a guy who keeps protesting that he's not just a name-dropping, celebrity-skewering, Beverly Hills–dishing Hollywood novelist, Bruce Wagner isn't working awfully hard to dispel such notions. In fact, he's not working very hard at all in his slim new novel, which concerns the flailing sons and daughters of famous parents, all of them bound into the same Los Angeles celebconomy. Narrator Bertie is a wanna-be writer who acts on the latest spin-off of his father's Star Trek–like TV franchise; new to the cast is Clea, Bertie's high-school girlfriend, now a recovering addict and damaged daughter of some tragically deceased actress; guesting on the same sci-fi series is Thad—novelist, actor, and son of a literary luminary of the larger-than-life Norman Mailer generation. All three, Bertie concedes, are still dining off their parents' table scraps, trading on their A-list surnames to advance their B-list careers. All three dream of pitching HBO with Curb Your Enthusiasm clones about their minor-celebrity lives and major parental issues.
