Raging Quill

You don’t have to read a word of Jackie Collins’ oeuvre to know what she’s talking about. There’s a special kind of aura to the books. Their glossy cover designs and shameless titles vibrate with the promise of good, cheap, nostalgic fun--like the sight of a redwood hot tub and a sweating bottle of chardonnay lying nearby.

For three decades, Collins has offered lots of sex and teasing glimpses of the celebrity life to those 9-to-5’ers who come home too tired to be naughty but not too tired to read about it. Yet lurking behind all the dirty innuendos and steamy sex scenes--more numerous than a starlet’s ex-husbands--is a surprising commitment to two seemingly un-Collins-esque virtues: marriage and monogamy.

That’s not to say that Collins is a moralist writing in the vein of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa”--hardly that. But Collins’ focus on holy matrimony did show up as early as 1969, in her first novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men.” Though the title sounds like a ringing endorsement of infidelity, “Married Men” is, in fact, a cautionary tale, dispensing a dose of punishment for its protagonist, a philandering husband caught once too often.

Justice is similarly meted out in “Hollywood Wives: The New Generation,” a sequel to “Hollywood Wives,” the 1983 book that put Collins on the map as a Hollywood icon and authority. Although she had achieved fame with eight other novels--including what may be her best, 1981’s “Chances”--”Hollywood Wives” and a 1985 Aaron Spelling TV mini-series based on the book cemented her standing as Hollywood’s best-selling bedroom confidante.

Few of the original wives return in “The New Generation.” Nearly 20 years has also brought a sea change in the template for the typical “Hollywood Wife.” In the ‘80s, the wives focused on furthering their husbands’ careers. Now they have careers and ambitions of their own, and they want to be perceived as their husbands’ equals.

There’s an odd, off-title dissonance to “The New Generation,” though. On closer examination, the focus of the book turns out not to be the five characters who jokingly refer to themselves as “The New Hollywood Wives,” but primarily one of them, 40-year-old film and music superstar Lissa Roman, and her 19-year-old daughter, Nicci.

Though Lissa (who’s a one-name celeb, like Cher or Madonna) is a wife at the beginning of the novel, her story has little to do with her life as a Hollywood wife or divorcee-in-the-making; it’s more about her increasing attraction to Michael Scorsinni, the private investigator she’s hired to trail her adulterous husband. Nicci’s story revolves around her growing attraction to her fiance Evan’s twin brother, Brian, who, along with Evan, produces gross-out teen comedy films a la the Farrelly brothers.

It is in the love stories of Lissa and Nicci that “The New Generation” most strongly reprises Collins’ recurrent themes of latent male virtue rewarded and marriage to the right partner. Only by casting out the adulterous husband does Lissa find the man who’s ready to commit, Scorsinni. Likewise, only by dropping her seemingly perfect and honorable fiance Evan--caught cheating on a film set--does Nicci discover that his rakish tabooed brother Brian is more than simply a man on the prowl: He’s just waiting for the woman worthy of his commitment.

A third storyline in “The New Generation” goes to another “new Hollywood wife,” Taylor Singer, an actress who gets raked over the coals for cheating on her husband, a Steven Spielberg-like director. However, the other three wives--soul diva Kyndra, producer Stella Rossiter and James, the gay layabout partner of a record industry mogul--appear only in brief scenes, as minor supporting characters.

Still, what appeals about a Jackie Collins novel is not the promise of rational, evenly paced narratives or even ones that precisely deliver on the topical promise of their titles. It’s more that Collins is a natural-born storyteller, a writer with an instinctive gift for racing narrative that is as willfully chaotic as anything in life. In interviews she has famously acknowledged writing in longhand and surrendering herself to the spontaneous will and whims of her characters. The result is a style that might be called raging as much as it is racing.

One of the most raging elements at the beginning of almost every Collins Hollywood novel is a psychotic serial killer whose place in the lives of the main characters becomes clear only gradually, as the novel unfolds. In “The New Generation,” the part of the psycho-killer goes to Eric Vernon, a disgruntled failure who organizes a plot to kidnap Nicci for a ransom of millions.

Will the killer succeed? Will Lissa and Nicci both find lasting love in a world where everything’s marked with yesterday’s expiration date? Will “Hollywood Wives” remain on the bestseller lists?

The answers to these questions remain for readers to discover because the only thing predictable in a Jackie Collins novel is the desire to turn the page. *