Book Review : Unfunny Fiction About a Hollywood Movie Mogul

Blockbuster by Patricia Marx and Douglas G. McGrath (Bantam New Fiction: 218 pages; $7.95.)

Last week I received a letter from an irate author consumed with fury because I’d given his book a bad review. He brought up an interesting point: If I hadn’t liked the book, why hadn’t I given it to someone else to review--someone who would have loved it, and said so? I answered him that, over years, people learn reviewers’ tastes; that there were perhaps 50% of readers of any review who would take the opposite tack, rushing out to buy what that reviewer panned. Reviewing, even at its very best and most responsible, must always be a judgment call.

This is particularly true with comic novels. Laughing is a lot like kissing; what appeals to one person will leave another one totally cold. That doesn’t mean that if someone is rejected, he should stop telling jokes or attempting to kiss people: Sooner or later--and all artists and lovers must go on believing this--an audience, a beloved, somewhere, somehow, must eventually reciprocate.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that everyone who can’t stand this particular reviewer’s taste should immediately buy a copy of “Blockbuster,” a comic novel that brought this reader to new, heretofore unexplored levels of boredom, alienation and despair. “Blockbuster” just isn’t funny. It’s 218 pages long but it reads as slowly as “War and Peace.” But the authors obviously think it’s funny, and that may be the problem. They’re like salesmen at a convention, cracking up at their own jokes before anyone else gets to hear the punch lines.

A Terrible Movie

“Blockbuster” is the chronicle of how one last terrible movie kills off a movie studio. The “authors” come in at the beginning, saying or recording that the sisters of X. Y. Schwerdloff Jr.--who was nicknamed Bucky because of his teeth--have been in contact with them, asking them to write a book about Bucky’s downfall: “We wanted,” the authors write, “the reader to hear the story as we heard it, told in the same voices.”

The authors begin, however, with the narrative background of X. Y. Sr.: “When Riva Schwerdloff gave birth to a son on Nov. 28, 1895, she had little idea that he would someday be the head of the most prestigious movie studio in Hollywood and no idea whatsoever that in 1956 he would win the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars. She only knew that when she put a pillow over his face the crying stopped a little and she could get some sleep. The baby under that pillow was movie mogul X. Y. Schwerdloff.”

X. Y. Sr. goes into the rug business and then into movies, and there are many paragraphs here about how many rugs there are in the early Schwerdloff films. Then X. Y. gets married and has three children--two girls whom he ignores and who go on, respectively, to work in the World Bank and to become the first woman admiral. But Bucky is spoiled so much that if he gets the wrong idea in school his father pulls a string so that the teacher will teach his mistakes as the truth. Accordingly, Bucky believes that Alexander Graham Bell invented the “belt” and Edgar Allan Poe founded Poland, and no one contradicts him, and that joke takes many forms and goes on for a long time.

Sisters Back Ventures

Bucky founds a food franchise that sells baked winter squash. Bucky invents “straight rope.” Bucky thinks he’s succeeding because his sisters back his enterprises. Then Bucky hooks up with a monk who’s run off from the monastery and decides to do a film version of “Pilgrim’s Progress.” He hires a director out of the loony bin who makes his female star undergo four nose jobs in 12 weeks and then sets her on fire.

What comes through loud and clear is that the authors have mixed up “mean” with “funny.” Yes, there’s cruelty in most comedy, but that doesn’t mean that everything cruel is funny. “Blockbuster” is mean-spirited and as solemn as the tomb. This is especially depressing because the novel is part of a fine line of new fiction that’s been a venue for talented new authors.

So I really hope I’m wrong about this one. If you distrust the reviewer, or if the quotes appeal to you at all, rush out and buy this book. Even if you hate it, you might give it to an enemy for Christmas.