Double feature A novel

Owen King

Book - 2013

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Subjects
Published
New York : Scribner 2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Owen King (-)
Edition
1st Scribner hardcover ed
Physical Description
ix, 419 p. ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781451676891
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

"DOUBLE FEATURE" is a lame title for a novel that is epic, ambitious and dedicated to the uncontainable. Nor is the jacket of service; it shows a couple of old movie tickets when it needs a scrum of characters, not getting anywhere but being their talkative and irrepressible selves. I'd guess that this novel - Owen King's first, after an esteemed story collection - was compiled over a period of years, possibly as a series of short stories about a group of characters. The novel is maybe a third too long, chiefly because as he wanders around King can hardly see a place, a face or a chair without embarking on a wordy, if not literary, description of it. This might have been cut by someone (why not King?) who can see that brevity is his best quality. But he may be a tricky man to edit or organize. He should persevere, for when he is good - and that is often enough to make a page turner of this book - he has a captivating energy, a precision and a fondness for people that are rare and that make the reader doubly impatient for him to do what he does best. Despite the title and the ticket stubs, this is not really a book about the movies. It's true that in its opening section, Sam Dolan makes a low-budget film with friends and enemies before the material is stolen and turned into a comic disaster. And it's true that his father, Booth Dolan, is an actor in dreadful movies, as an extension of his general theatricality. Booth has crossed paths with Orson Welles and cherishes that large legend enough to be enriched and misled by it. Later on in life Sam works in a video store, and then becomes a weddingographer, making little movies about fragile marriages. There are plenty of cinematic references, including a running debate about whether you cried at "E.T." To that extent, it could be mistaken for a novel that Quentin Tarantino might have written on his way to Hollywood. With this extra: King loves people as well as words, and he has the reach of a novelist. So "Double Feature" is a story about parents as a model for affection and a tribute to life itself. Sam is the child of divorce: his mother, Allie, quit her marriage because Booth could not stop acting, talking, betraying and acting out the betrayals. In life he would be exhausting and boring to a fatal degree. But Sam sees him in flashes and scenes, and that's where Booth flowers. He is a large man, not just in physique but in imaginative aspiration and self-deception. He goes away without warning; he takes up with other women; he is impossible. But Allie cannot stop loving him. As a young woman, on meeting Booth, she saw: "He was 29, this gravy-breathed, bookshelf-shouldered boy in the wrinkled and dusty suit." She is a smart, amusing woman possessed of exceptional kindness and insight. When the marriage collapses she realizes the need to comfort Booth, and in fact their relationship becomes more stable and sustaining once they are apart. Booth requires an audience, but an audience has the stamina for only a couple of hours here and there. Visiting the young Sam's classroom, Booth becomes a player king: "My name is Booth Dolan. I am a storyteller and a thespian. A thespian is an actor. I make believe on a professional basis. I pretend to be people who I am not. You are children. You make believe as a matter of course. I presume that each of you is competent at making believe on at least a semiprofessional level." The young Sam says he can't stand his father, when the real problem is just dealing with him. It's the great success of this novel that as Booth unwinds and slows just a little, we feel Sam becoming appreciative of the ham and the fraud. Booth is Wellesian, to be sure, but there are dashes of Falstaff, Micawber, Sterne's Uncle Toby and the father in Geoffrey Wolff's masterly memoir, "The Duke of Deception." He has set-piece speeches and a collection of false noses. His talk is as heady as home brew. "Factually, we're all dying," he says, "all the time. From the moment of conception, we are dying." Is that rhetoric or "King Lear" (a question that recalls Welles's ability to improvise Shakespeare that neither the Bard nor anyone else had ever written)? You groan at the flights of fancy, but you want those wings for yourself, while seeing that a son would hardly dare to speak in the aftermath of so many grandiloquent speeches. If Owen King has a father (and he might), that man should be fit to burst with pride, and alarm, at this endearing monster. Just as fine is the mother's wistful awareness of Booth. Consider this passage, in which Allie talks to a grudging Sam, as a measure of King's graceful humor: '"Lots of men laugh at themselves, but not many like it when women laugh at them. Your father just loves it when people laugh, doesn't he? I hope someday you understand how exceptional that is. What other fathers talk about books or have been to other countries or - ' She did this occasionally, started talking to Sam about his father but ended up talking to herself, a goofy grin spreading across her face the way it never did unless the subject was Booth. It was the one time when he thought his mother seemed less than adult." That is the real stuff, I think, and there's plenty of it along with plenty more that you'll just have to endure. I mean the overwriting; the scraps of screenplay and text messaging; and the elaborate structure that never convinced me it had a purpose beyond being willful and showy and afraid of directness. The 13-page unbroken paragraph with which Sam describes the making of his film is a horrible mistake that crushes much of the humor in the situation. One character has a list of 75 things that cause fatigue, which should be 76 because the list deserves its own place. The ending of the book collapses in sentimentality and a weary urge to bring the surviving characters together in a party. In short, there is a great deal of excess, as if King had not quite found the discipline or the confidence to trust the resonant simplicity he displays when Allie sees a snapping turtle crossing the road and knows it is in danger. So she acts: "A few seconds after Allie placed the turtle on the grass at the side of the road, a gray pickup truck passed around the curve, tools rattling in its bed. That thing would have punched your ticket, she tried to tell the turtle. The animal was a few feet from where she was lying, gazing at her with amber eyes. Allie didn't remember falling down - perhaps she had passed out for a moment - but there was no pain, a vague heaviness where the left side of her body used to be. She could smell the warm pavement." In its specificity and its quiet power - the small moment heralding something larger and more important - this passage feels almost cinematic. Better still, it feels novelistic. With all of its cinematic references, this could be mistaken for a novel by Quentin Tarantino. David Thomson is the author, most recently, of "The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 7, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

When film-studies graduate Sam Dolan sells all his collectibles and maxes out every credit card he has to make his first movie, he intends it be a uniquely honest and realistic story about the disenchantment of lost youth. But things don't work out quite the way he expects, and he abandons his directing dreams to sink into a disillusioned depression. He remains detached, continuing to view the world as though it were a film, but eventually is forced to deal with the things he has been avoiding, like his estranged relationship with his philandering actor father and his eroding bond with his younger half sister, by hiding behind the imaginary camera. Set in a world of B-movie actors and enthusiasts, King's first novel, about facing reality and failed aspirations, is irreverent and ambitious. Its sweeping scope covers several generations in a humorous and cynical narrative that bounces between decades. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this captivating look at the ongoing process of becoming an adult will especially appeal to fans of the indie film industry.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This witty debut novel from King, (We're All in This Together), son of Stephen, is about film and family. Endearing, irascible Sam Dolan is a young filmmaker with a big father problem-that is, his dad, B-movie actor Booth Dolan, has a personality that's a big problem. But Sam finds even more trouble when his first film, a magnum opus called Who We Are, is mysteriously, and irrevocably, altered in editing. When Sam throws away the only known copy of the altered film, he sets in motion events that will dog him for a decade. His horribly revamped movie turns up in the mid-2000s and becomes a cult hit, as Sam, permanently disappointed, goes from clerking in a Brooklyn video store to working as a wedding videographer. During one long weekend in 2011, Sam comes to terms with his father and his messy life-with the help of a wry and determined producer, Sam's foul-mouthed kid sister, Mina, and Wesley Latsch, his odd, housebound best friend/roommate. King's prose is artful, perceptive about people and their "warrens of self that go beyond understanding," and sometimes very funny. Agent: Amy Williams, McCormack & Williams. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In spring 2002, Sam Dolan is bringing his artistic vision to life: a low-budget, serious film about soul-searching twentysomethings at a small liberal arts college. Sam's cinematic legacy includes his garrulous father, Booth, a B-movie actor who left Sam's mother, Allie, for one of his unstable mistresses. Once Sam's film experiment concludes unexpectedly, the narrative flashes back and forth from his childhood with often-absent Booth to his post-auteur stint as a wedding videographer. Throw in a satyr, a precocious stepsister, and a blogger roommate, and the stage is set for a tender, hilarious first novel from short-fiction writer and educator King (We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories) that deftly follows the twisted path of family relationships, legacies, and the baggage we all deal with. VERDICT Fans of John Irving, Tom Perrotta, Jonathan Tropper, and Nick Hornby will appreciate this urban family tale liberally dosed with humor. [See Prepub Alert, 9/27/12.]--Jennifer B. Stidham, Baytown, TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Gen-Y angst riffles the pages of King's (We're All in this Together, 2005) debut novel. This is an often weirdly funny book, all the same. Samuel Dolan graduated from a liberal arts college in upstate New York. His girlfriend, Polly, left to live with her parents in Florida. Sam's mother is dead, and Sam doesn't much like his father, Booth. Booth Dolan has made a career out of scenery-chewing in B-movies--and doing what he wants, including chasing skirts. Sam's passionate ambition is his indie film, Who We Are, "about the costs of growing up--and the costs of not growing up. And that was heavy stuff." Sam makes his film, but the film that finds its way into print isn't the film he made, thanks to the crazed machinations of Brooks, an unstable assistant director Sam took on since he was a rich kid who chipped in big bucks. Years later, Sam ends up in Brooklyn doing "weddingography," themed if you like--Grindhouse, Nouvelle Vague or Citizen Wedding. And Who We Are? It's a cult film "playing to packed, goofy, inebriated houses," complete with the Brooks-inserted masturbating satyr and other aberrations. There are even residual checks, which Sam refuses to cash. King's characters are both attractive and realistic, not only larger-than-life Booth and disaffected Sam, but also Allie, Sam's mother, who was always cool and accepting, even of Booth's "blithe selfishness." There's Mina, Sam's wise and fragile half sister; Polly, who still beds Sam even after marrying a buffoonish retired Yankee baseball player; Rick Savini, an eccentric yet successful character actor who treats Sam as an equal; and television producer Tess, earnest and bossy, whom Sam meets as he films a wedding. The narrative blossoms and unfolds and expands, Sam becoming wiser and more likable, even as he reconciles with his world at a happily-enough-ever-after homecoming. Unique in concept and execution, with much mention of Orson Welles and Dog Day Afternoon, King's novel is winning. Superbly imagined lit-fic about family, fathers and film.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.