It is the morning after the 2003 Academy
Awards. Max—an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has
waned—and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy
from last night’s red-carpet festivities. They are talking
about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq,
recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and
guests like these demand attention. There is Max’s ex-wife, “the
legendary Zoe Cunningham,” a dazzling half-Jamaican movie star,
with her new lover, the enigmatic healer, Paul (fraudulent? enlightened?).
Max’s agent, Stoney, a perhaps too easygoing version of his
legendary agent father, can’t stay away, and neither can Zoe
and Max’s daughter, Isabel, though she would prefer to maintain
her hard-won independence. And of course there is the next-door neighbor,
Cassie, who seems to know everyone’s secrets.
As they share
their stories of Hollywood past and present, watch films in Max’s
opulent screening room, gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms,
the tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers an exquisitely woven, virtuosic
work—a Hollywood novel as only she could fashion it, told with bravura,
rich with delightful characters, spiced with her signature wit. It is a joyful,
sexy, and wondrously insightful pleasure.
