Discoveries

My Last Movie Star: A Novel of Hollywood, Martha Sherrill

Random House: 350 pp., $23.95

“Is this story about me or the idea of me?” Allegra Coleman, movie starlet, asks Clementine James, celebrity profiler for Flame magazine. Coleman, poised on the brink of an Oscar, is a breathtaking beauty “doing a sky dive toward some bull’s eye of fame.” Shallow, flirting Malibu-style with Buddhism, “she had to connect when she talked.” “On the subject of sex, she was open in the way women never are after they’ve become famous, unless they happen to be crazy too.”

The interview is going swimmingly; James is being paid $150,000 for the profile, but somehow the two hit it off and end up on the lam, running from Coleman’s commitments, the W to the Sunset Marquis to Shutters to Two Bunch to San Simeon in Coleman’s Porsche.

Being a SoCal reader, you can expect to experience that rare thrill from which literary New Yorkers squeeze so much juice: the recognition of landmarks like the good old I-5, or weather patterns like the Santa Anas. Clem has reached the end of her interest in celebrity profiles. Allegra Coleman is going to be her last, after which she will quit the bad life for her nature boy lover, Ned.

“It was a pathetic life and deeply unimportant work, as Ned was always reminding me. But it had saved me, in a way, lifted me out of New Jersey and the tragic blandness of my past.” But the Porsche crashes, Coleman disappears, and James wakes up in Cedars-Sinai missing one eye. Here’s where the novel gets clever.

While James waits for a new eye, she is haunted by Hollywood’s most glamorous stars. First, Dorothy Lamour appears in a sarong at her bedside, followed by Gloria Swanson, Loretta Young, Marion Davies, Tallulah Bankhead, Myrna Loy and Natalie Wood. Each has her own cryptic intelligence on the “vagaries of fame.” “We’re worried about her,” explains Swanson, referring to Coleman’s disappearance. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” as though they were a thrilling flock of angels watching over each new star.

Martha Sherrill, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, knows whereof she writes, and has done a great deal of research on the lives of these women. The novel includes a filmography and several unforgettable, movie-obsessed characters. It is not trite. It is not silly. It is warm and serious and funny and imaginative. The writing is cool, the plot fantastic. To live here is to be haunted by these icons. Sherrill lets us live easily with them for a little while.

*

The Hipster Handbook, Robert Lanham, Anchor Books: 184 pp., $9.95 paper

Something like “The Official Preppy Handbook,” but also not like it at all, “The Hipster Handbook” is your official guide to the language, culture and style of hipsters young and old. “If you are wearing a sweatshirt that has a Disney character on it,” the author warns, “this book is not for you.”

If, however, you “graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn’t won a game since the Reagan administration,” or if “you have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation” and “have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend,’ ” it may well prove a useful addition to your research library.

Lanham makes a bit too much of what’s “deck” and what’s “fin,” and of the various classifications of hipster: “Neo-crunch” are the “post-Garcia hippies promoting idealism for a new century”; “polits” are “extremely literary hipsters who have philosophical approaches to politics and existence”; a “Maxwell” is “a gay hipster”; a “UTF” is an “Unemployed Trust Funder.”

Art, irony, style, music, Martin Amis, Bozo the Clown (pre-Willard Scott), Artforum magazine, cosmopolitans, P.J. Harvey, “High Fidelity” -- these are all deck. The Olive Garden, Sandra Bullock, hairspray, gutter punks, green apple martinis are fin. There’s even a dating guide for various hipster combinations.

Take it with a grain; if it doesn’t make you laugh, don’t bother; and remember, if it’s mainstream enough to be in a guidebook, it’s probably already fin -- which is not to say that it won’t be deck again someday. It will.