TELEVISION, by Lauren Rothery
What a disservice to compare the young writer Lauren Rothery, as some publicity materials have, to Joan Didion. (Besides which, if one more person gets compared to Didion this decade I’m going to zip on a Big Bird suit and run screaming into traffic on the 101.)
Rothery’s first novel, “Television,” is set mostly in Los Angeles, and like “Play It as It Lays” concerns the movie and television business, and chronicles a breakdown of sorts, and the author is a woman. Is that all it takes?
Actually, the two books do share the by now distressingly common misuse of the transitive verb “lay” for “lie” and its conjugations — “I laid down on the sofa”; “she just laid there by the fire”; and “I spread my towel on the sand, took off my top, laid down and slept until 10:33” are all quotes from “Television.”
“I don’t know how long we lay (laid?) there,” one character writes in a letter she’ll never send, sensing but unable to resolve the wrongness.
This grammatical blip aside, Rothery’s book is funny, thinky and with a style all her own. (If anything, there’s just a whiff of Martin Amis’s “Money.”) Rich with casual shout-outs to faded figures of the cultural firmament — Kim Stanley! Tanaquil Le Clerq! Gorky! — it flickers with wistful though not altogether coherent commentary on our changing, increasingly fragmented consumption habits, and the bizarro entertainment economy of the 2020s.
“Television” alternates between three characters’ internal monologues, like channels: the first two more compelling than the third.
Verity, it takes a few pages to verify, is a male actor: a handsome movie star with a “Hardy Krüger jaw”; a penchant for champagne, which is how his Belgian friend pronounces “Sean Penn”; and at 50, an advanced midlife crisis. When we first see him, he’s unraveling drunkenly on a plane. He drives a 1965 Alfa Romeo, owns eight houses and — the ultimate elite flex — eschews smartphones, which he stuffily refers to as “rectangles.” Producers have started to de-age him using A.I., and he’s giving in somewhat queasily to the temptation of sleeping with far younger women.
Playing a green super-creature in the fifth installment of an action franchise, Verity marvels to an attractive GQ interviewer that he’ll be making $80 million, and subsequently decides to lottery it off to a ticket buyer, like some newfangled Willy Wonka. This is about as much plot as “Television” gets.
The second narrator is Helen, a struggling playwright — not to be redundant — in her late 40s, who met Verity at a now-defunct diner (there’s little more L.A. than a defunct diner). They have a special, tender, possessive and sometimes sexual friendship that she refuses to take to the next level, declaring, “The dynamic of married people contains little intrigue for me outside of Bergman” (Ingmar). Helen is a sociable, skeptical creature who makes “four-hour friends” at parties and understands that the modern audience, if it can even be described as a collective, is locked in a loop of reality and short-form video.
A quarter of the way through we meet the younger Phoebe, a struggling screenwriter — not to be redundant again — whose grandparents have just died two days apart in southwest France after over 50 years of marriage.
Traveling there to wrap up this shared life, Phoebe hopes for a variety of pure inspiration unachievable in Hollywood, where she has become distracted by recreational drug use and anxiety about aging. “When I watched a movie,” she confesses, “I paused on close-ups of the actresses. I compared the lines around their eyes to mine,” and it does unsettle the nerves to realize: “Meryl Streep was 29 in ‘Manhattan.’”
Her abortive scriptwriting efforts, replicated here and stunted by algorithmic overwhelm, unfortunately feel like a kind of filler. “BIT [EXPLETIVE]. COME BACK TO WHEN A BETTER WRITER,” she’ll type, like a junior Charlie Kaufman from “Adaptation.” Later: “BIT [EXPLETIVE]. RECONSIDER CAREER PATH.”
Figuring out where Phoebe fits into the Verity-Helen dynamic will take some work. And Rothery renders the strange textures of L.A. so wonderfully — the smell of a swimming pool “Clorox Jell-O in a cream tile dish”; the immersive theater of a carwash; the “touchy, sulfuric” plumbing in one of those slapped-up apartments — that the trip to France is like flipping to PBS.
Not a lot happens in “Television,” but plenty is intuited, expressed and discussed. In a world where soundtracks increasingly stand in for sustained dialogue, and pure stupidity gets a million hits, this book has the rhythm of clever conversation, and casual erudition, remembered fondly from “My Dinner With André.” It’s a glamorous, intriguing novel with a sense of still being in progress: There’s little resolution, but a lot of promise.
TELEVISION | By Lauren Rothery | Ecco | 256 pp. | $28
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