Book Review : Tale Glides on Memories From Novels and Movies

Unhealthful Air by Elliott Baker (Viking: $15.95; 199 pp.)

What a mild, sweet, blossomy little novel “Unhealthful Air” is! How inoffensive, how flattering, really, in its assumption that its readers will know the twin genres of the movies and Hollywood novels inside out. Elliott Baker knows we’ve read the Pat Hobby stories, that string of slight, cynical narratives written by F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was in Hollywood, down on his luck.

Hard-Luck Hero

Baker knows that when he mentions “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” we will remember that either Nathanael West or Horace McCoy wrote that cinematic relic. And Baker knows that when his own hard-luck hero, Corey Burdick, a middle-aged writer also down on his own luck, remembers a line like “You have to get this message to Lotus Blossom in Macow!,” most of his readers will--if only dimly--recall Anna May Wong and Sylvia Sidney and trains careening through north China to a sad, if glamorous, destiny.

Obligatory Party Scene

The authors sure will appreciate his “obligatory party scene.” He’s betting that when he names his villain Quentin, we’ll catch a shadowy glimpse of Orrin, that perverted maniac creation of Raymond Chandler’s--Orrin, whose favorite weapon was always an ice pick. And, most of all, when Baker creates “Meetings” between himself and a gaggle of charmingly moronic producers, he counts upon his West Coast, literate readership to know what he’s talking about; to sigh, and to remember.

Corey Burdick, then, is a 50ish Hollywood writer down in the badlands of depression and anomie. His ex-wife speaks to him in phrases from badly written psychology books; his wiseacre son has chosen to find salvation in the Himalayas. Burdick himself has lost a bundle betting on the horses, and when he looks back on his career as a rewriter, he finds little to comfort him: “I wrote descriptions like ‘the slug leaves a hole in his head the size of a walnut,’ and dialogue like ‘you know what I mean, man. I mean, you better know.’ . . . I wrote about an outbreak of rabies on a cruise ship and ditto for syphilis in the Continental Congress . . . I wrote about a geography teacher who turns out to be a psychotic killer and an evangelist who turns out to be a psychotic killer and I wrote about a psychotic killer who rehabilitates his fellow inmates by muscling them into a production of “Porgy and Bess.”

A Watershed Year

Worst of all, Burdick seems doomed to sit through more interminable meetings, where producers with chimpanzee-brains intone things like “1939 and 1940 . . . watershed years,” to which Burdick can only lamely reply, “Name any year that wasn’t,” but his repartee is empty because his living and his future depend on these airheads to whom phrases like “watershed year” seem as significance-filled as the theory of relativity was to Einstein himself.

All Burdick really wants is for his “own work” to be taken seriously. He has his out-of-print volume of short stories to prove it. Then, suddenly, as in the movies, or in Hollywood novels, a strange woman begins leaving messages on his answering machine, a huge, nameless bruiser flattens him in a parking lot, and by a mean trick of luck, Burdick finds out that he has to pay his bookie $500 by noon tomorrow. In desperation, Burdick takes an assignment rewriting the Pat Hobby stories for television, except that in this version, instead of being an aging writer, Pat Hobby is a beautiful young actress trying to break into the movies.

The mysterious voice on Burdick’s answering machine belongs to a bimbo named Bambi. The bruiser, Quentin, whom Bambi tries to pass off as her brother, is really her husband, and Quentin insists on collaborating with Burdick on the tacky Pat Hobby script. . . .

It Can Be Done

Meanwhile , Burdick’s bookie has ordered Burdick to write a fool-proof scenario for a million-dollar heist out at the Santa Anita track. Burdick insists it can’t be done, but he soon figures out how it can. Meanwhile , Bambi may be a space cadet, but she loves Burdick’s short stories, which makes her an angel in his eyes.

You might guess that the television script, the Pat Hobby twist, is a success. How could it not be, with pea-brained bruiser Quentin calling the shots? The horse race heist--that “real life” scenario--is a little more iffy.

I wouldn’t want to give away the plot, but Burdick has been insulted so many times, and been such a good sport about it, that it would be a shame to deny him his happy ending. The odds would be, oh, maybe 3-to-1, that Burdick and Bambi will find at least a provisionally happy ending. Failing that, they can always “boil some hot water, lots of it! or, they could strike out together to finally get that long-delayed message to Lotus Blossom in Macow.”