The spectators A novel

Review by New York Times Review

I was going to say that the last good novel about a media personality was Stanley Elkin's "The Dick Gibson Show," the fabulous 1971 tale of a motor-mouthed radio host, but then I remembered that the last good novel about a movie star was Brock Brower's "The Late Great Creature," published in - well, whattaya know, 1971. Rock-star novels have fared better, with the more recently great "Stone Arabia," by Dana Spiotta, in 2011. All of which is to say, good fiction about celebrity culture is tricky to pull off and rare. (Best of luck to whoever's out there doing a final polish on the definitive public radio/podcast novel, featuring a carefully altered version of Ira Glass.) What a good surprise it is, therefore, to come upon Jennifer duBois's "The Spectators" and read a novel about a TV star that feels just right. A big-canvas effort spanning the late 1960s to the early 1990s, it's a showcase for Matthew Miller, host of "The Mattie M Show," the sort of afternoon program in which angry guests come on to vent and rant and throw the occasional chair as security guards stand by, rubbing their biceps nervously. The story is set during the golden age of daytime talk: You will perhaps inevitably think of Mattie as Jerry Springer crossed with Phil Donahue's furrowed-brow earnestness, or Montei Williams with Maury Povich's oily condescension. But duBois has thought of these guys too and is always one step ahead of you. She creates her own man, with his own unique pricklinesses. We take the full measure of Mattie through the eyes of two cheerfully unreliable narrators: Semi, a struggling playwright who was one of Mattie's lovers starting in the 1970s, and Cel, the highly harried publicist for "The Mattie M Show" in the 1990s. Through them, we witness Mattie starting his career not in showbiz but as an idealistic lawyer - a public defender who first encounters Semi when the latter and a group of his friends are harassed and rounded up by the New York cops, arrested for being gay in a gay bar. Married to a very long-suffering woman, Mattie launches into a passionate, furtive fling with Semi: " It came slowly, then all at once: a delusional, fiendish love. How many nights, how many calls, how many pennies cast up at his window? How many keys dropped down to the sidewalk? ... And yet it seems to have been only one night, eternally recurring." Semi is attracted to Mattie for his often infuriating contradictions. A learned, ambitious man, Mattie had dreams of becoming mayor of New York City, and from there launching a presidential run, and you can be sure he's compared to both John F. and Robert Kennedy. That Mattie sells his soul to a cheesy TV show and hates both himself and his audience only makes him more tragic and appealing to Semi, who describes himself as being "in the thrall of a profound and unseemly attachment." In contrast, Cel is a demurely acerbic young woman who speaks in a darkly comic voice about the day-to-day taping of a daytime squawk-fest: "The guest list is mediocre. There's the boy who knifed his father - a classic sociopath: empty-eyed and charming. There's the mother of a teenager who'd shot his girlfriend and then himself on the night of their junior prom. There's a compulsive thief whose only notable achievement is being banned for life from every big-box chain department store in the nation." For most of the novel, Semi and Cel exist separately, in alternating chapters. As duBois charts the history of her chosen era, she does a fine job of summoning up the atmosphere of confusion and dread in the years immediately before the AIDS epidemic had a name. Semi will eventually write a play about that plague called "The Spectators" - duBois makes it sound like an Off Broadway miniaturization of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" - but for most of this novel, Semi is a writer's-blocked spectator peeping into Mattie's private life. Soon enough, "The Mattie M Show" will be engulfed in controversy, as a mass shooting in Ohio may have been inspired by the take-no-prisoners behavior it displays daily. Indeed, Mattie proves to have a disturbing connection to one of the shooters. While I understand that duBois needed what screenwriters call an inciting event to propel her narrative forward - forcing Mattie to reckon with what his reckless on-air persona has set loose - I prefer the novel's shrewder explorations of Semi's and Cel's intense lives and casual musings: "Part of the reason it took her so long to figure out that everyone in New York was secretly rich was that everyone talked so much about being poor." DuBois is the author of two previous novels, one of which, "Cartwheel," is a fictional exploration of the deadly scandal involving the study-abroad student Amanda Knox; I'd call it witty and clever were it not about an appalling fact-based murder. With "The Spectators," duBois is staking out larger literary territory. The new novel is full of small pleasures that accumulate as proof that this writer knows her stuff: Consider, for example, the chapter devoted to Mattie's guest appearance on "Lee and Lisa," a dead ringer for the jolly-but-tense morning show Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford used to host. DuBois's mastery of such details earns our trust as she expands "The Spectators" into a billowing meditation on the responsibility of public figures to contribute something worthwhile to the culture. Although her book takes place decades ago, duBois's message has a contemporary urgency as well. KEN TUCKER, formerly Entertainment Weekly's TV critic and New York magazine's movie critic, is a music criticfor NPR's "Fresh Air With Terry Gross."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

So who is Matthew Miller, really: an attorney who is a public defender? A politician? A closeted gay? The host of the Mattie M Show, a sensational and sensationally popular afternoon TV program (think Jerry Springer)? Or is he all of the above? Answers are sometimes forthcoming from DuBois' co-protagonists, Semi, a playwright who is Miller's erstwhile lover, and Cel, a young publicist for the show. Semi tells his story in his thoughtful first-person voice, while Cel is remanded to third-person, the novel's action moving back and forth between them. Set in New York between 1969 and 1993, the novel offers a remarkably acute examination of gay life in the 1970s and, especially, in the plague years of the '80s, while inviting speculation about the place of the Mattie M Show in American popular culture. This last is exacerbated when two aggrieved teens responsible for a mass shooting at their high school are revealed to be Mattie M Show fans. What will the fallout of that revelation be? The Spectators is a beautifully written, even aphoristic novel ( promiscuity, like class, is a spectrum on which everybody claims the middle ), but its greatest strength is its characterization: Semi and his gay friends, Cel and her mother and grandfather, and, of course, the always enigmatic Mattie are brilliantly conceived and, like the novel in which they star, utterly unforgettable.--Michael Cart Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

DuBois (Cartwheel) spans some 30 years of New York City history, moving between the queer gestalt of the 1970s and the television-junkie culture of the 1990s in her solid third novel. The story revolves around Matthew Miller, a sensationalist Jerry Springer-like talk show host who becomes the target of unwelcome media attention following a high school shooting whose perpetrators turn out to be fans of his The Mattie M. Show. Readers follow Mattie's put-upon publicist Cel as she navigates a treacherous landscape of scandal and recusal. But as the skeletons in Mattie's closet begin to emerge, readers become privy to the story of Semi Caldwell (who narrates a portion of the book), his secret past lover, when "Mattie" was simply Matthew, an upstanding lawyer and would-be politician in the heady days of Stonewall, before AIDS ravaged the gay community in the 1980s. As the story cuts between eras, the media circus that precipitates Mattie's fall from grace comes to mirror his abandonment of Semi, who eventually shows up at his TV studio looking for answers. DuBois beautifully handles Semi's half of the novel, told in first person, but the third-person Cel sections, in which she plays detective to piece together Mattie's past life, lack the power of Semi's. Though somewhat uneven, this is nevertheless a powerful novel. Agent: Henry Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

What causes a socially conscious public defender and burgeoning New York City politician to reinvent himself as the crass host of a reality television program designed to showcase our basest instincts? And what do we make of the 16 million spectators who thrill to the staged fights and tearful confessions on The Mattie M Show? DuBois (Cartwheel) takes readers on a trip from the late Sixties gay liberation movement, through the AIDS scourge in the Eighties, to the Nineties, when a mass school shooting still had the power to shock. Two narrators, Semi, a gay playwright and Matthew Miller's former lover, and Cel, Mattie's hapless publicist, attempt to unravel the mystery of the man whose public persona differs wildly from his private one. Dubois's writing is most powerful when channeling Semi, who rages against the disease that decimates the gay community, lamenting the exhaustion of caregiving, the weight of grief, and the resentment toward those who, like Mattie, are spared yet stay silent. Only years later, when fans of Mattie's show are blamed for an act of violence, will he take a stab at redemption. VERDICT A -Whiting Award winner and Pen/-Hemingway nominee, duBois writes an especially timely novel exploring the power of the media to foment chaos and the culpability of the public that validates the discord by watching. [See Prepub Alert, 10/8/18.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2019. 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.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A mass high school shooting prompts a reckoning for a controversial talk show host and those around him in duBois' (Cartwheel, 2013, etc.) third novel."He was Matthew Miller then," remembers a man named Semi, the host's lover in the 1970s, who knew him as an idealistic lawyer and then a candidate for mayor of New York. But in 1993, when The Mattie M Show publicist Cel is struggling to defuse reports that two high school boys who gunned down multiple classmates watched his show regularly, Mattie presides over a TV carnival of people confessing to "vices and depravities the average viewer didn't even know existed." The show's evolution from a substantive public affairs program to a wildly popular venue for "rubbernecking and mayhem" is more explicable than Mattie himself, an empathetic interlocutor of the damaged and deranged on camera but a mystery to his staff off the air. Semi's recollections of their affair and break-up intertwine with Cel's story to create an atmospheric chronicle of New York's bohemian gay subculture in the freewheeling 1970s, a keening depiction of the AIDS-stricken '80s, and a poignant portrait of Cel, who got out of the rural working class via Smith but still lacks the self-confidence to claimor even knowwhat she really wants. Mattie remains remote and enigmatic, even in his final encounters with Semi, which move him toward a fateful change of direction without readers ever really understanding him. This is not a fault but simply a given of duBois' accomplished narrative, which ranges widely to investigate contemporary culture through the complicated human beings who inhabit it: Cel's party-girl roommate and a judgmental pal from Smith, a predatory journalist, the TV show's seen-it-all producer, and one of the shooters (via a scarily thoughtful letter to Mattie) are among the other characters sketched with acuity and perception. The ending respects Matte's opacity but allows him to make some kind of amends to Semi, while Cel gets the fresh start she deserves.Elegant, enigmatic, and haunting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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One Cel 1993 Cel is in the greenroom pre-­interviewing the devil-­boy when the first reports of the shooting come in. The devil-­boy's name is Ezra Rosenzweig, though Cel has been told to address him only as Damian. He has a black odalisque neck tattoo and thumb-­sized subdermal horn implants; Cel keeps expecting these to twitch expressively, somehow, like the ears of a small dog. But the devil-­boy's horns do not move, and alongside his shaved eyebrows they contribute to an expression of general impassivity, so Cel doesn't quite register the extent of his surprise when he stops speaking of Satanic baptismal rites and says, "Oh, shit." Cel follows his gaze to the television, turned to a perpetually mute CNN. On the screen is a crimson-­blazered anchorwoman with melancholic eyes. Below her, a breaking news chyron declares that a shooter, or possibly two, has opened fire at a high school outside Cleveland. Cel turns up the volume. "--­High School has over fifteen hundred students enrolled," the anchorwoman is saying. Below her, rolling text announces reports of multiple casualties. The anchor wears an expression of perfectly choreographed concern--­Cel would never have noticed the hint of relief beneath it if she didn't work in television. "No word yet on who the shooter, or shooters, may be, but some early reports have suggested that students themselves could be involved--­" "Awful," says Cel, realizing that this is not the right word. Luke appears in the door, holding a clipboard. The clipboard is with him always, whether he has need to clip anything or not. "You saw," he says, glancing at the television. "We saw," says Cel. "You remember Luke, right, Ezra? I mean. Damian." On the screen, chopper footage is showing a bird's-­eye view of the school: red-­bricked, flanked by skeins of dusty playing fields. "Luke is a producer here at the show." Luke loathes the use of indefinite articles in reference to his job. "Yeah," says the devil-­boy, with unexpected timorousness. "Hi," says Luke, turning his head in the devil-­boy's direction. Luke has a gift for interacting with guests as though they are not entirely there; the way he addresses them somehow suggests that their speaking back would be not just impertinent, but impossible--­as though he is a weatherman and they are a green-­screen tornado. On the screen, the frame has extended to reveal an army of emergency vehicles: fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, local and state. Beyond the line of cars, Cel can just make out a few figures in lime-­green jackets--­EMTs, she figures, though none of them seem to be doing anything but waiting. Cel's mouth goes dry as she thinks of what they are waiting for. "So." Luke lets out a low whoosh of air. "Awful," Cel says again, senselessly. The devil-­boy is staring not at the television but at Luke, a look of respectful, nearly sycophantic curiosity on his face. Cel sincerely hopes that Luke doesn't see this, though she suspects that, all appearances to the contrary, he actually always sees everything. Luke turns, his gaze scraping at the air. "I'm going to borrow Cel for a minute, okay, pal?" Luke does not wait for the devil-­boy's assent. "Sara here will wait with you." Sara Ramos, the audience coordinator, has materialized in the doorway. Cel regards her with interest--­however much she dislikes her own job, she cannot imagine the horrors of Sara's--­then follows Luke and his clipboard into the hall. Outside, Luke tells her that Mattie wants to cancel today's taping. "Out of respect for the victims," he adds after a moment. From his tone, Cel can't tell whether he agrees with this decision or is just tired of fighting with Mattie. Either way, she knows he must be apoplectic about the timing. "Of course." Cel nods at the door, where the devil-­boy is waiting, unsuspecting. "So we'll tell him--­tomorrow?" Luke's grimace deepens beyond his usual default grimace. "I mean, is this just for today, or--­?" "I don't know." "So--­Monday, then?" "You don't have to tell him anything. Jesus." Luke runs his clipboard-­free hand through his hair. "Tell him we'll be in touch." "Is Mattie on strike now, or what?" "We just need to be very attentive to the optics." Luke is using what Cel thinks of as his press release voice. "After Secret Crush," says Cal. "Stop mentioning it. But yes." Cel only ever mentions it to Luke--­even she isn't that stupid. "Secret Crush" technically refers to an entire category of shows--­the formula is exactly what it sounds like, and Mattie has done dozens--­but these days is usually used to allude to a single episode. In that show, the Secret Crush object and subject were both men--­longtime co-­workers, evidently--­and though this was not the first time that had happened, it was the first time anyone involved seemed genuinely surprised. The Crushee had stormed off the stage and, later, badly beaten his admirer in the parking lot. Cel had heard he'd suffered permanent brain damage, though she'd also heard that the whole thing was staged, a PR stunt so ill-­conceived that it was arguably better to let the world think it was an actual hate crime. Cel's predecessor had quit and/or been fired and/or, according to some accounts, been hospitalized: the show had had to replace her in a hurry that bordered on derangement, which is how they'd wound up with Cel. "I suppose that makes sense," she says now. It does, from the standpoint of public relations--­which is, she has to keep reminding herself, her job, her job, somehow her job. But what really makes sense is that behind Mattie's stated reason for canceling is another reason, and that this reason is cynical and self-­serving. One of Mattie's many areas of genius is his ability to maintain a perfect streak of Cel's abysmally low regard. Excerpted from The Spectators: A Novel by Jennifer DuBois All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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