One star fades, another rises

“The BONES” is a snapshot of the point at which the careers and destinies of two very different men intersect, collide and explode. Frank Bones, an outlaw comedian with a serious substance-abuse problem whose last chance at success is a sitcom in which he is to play an Eskimo, is clearly on the way down. And Lloyd Melnick, a television writer with a 10-figure development deal and a big new house in Brentwood, is on the way up. The consequences are catastrophic and yet also comic, an appropriate denouement in a book that places both stand-up comedy and prime-time television in its cross hairs.

“Why didn’t you help me out back in L.A.?” Bones asks Melnick at a climactic moment in the story, which starts out as a sharp-edged novel of Hollywood manners and ends up as a hard-boiled mystery. “

Lloyd Melnick is clearly the author’s alter ego, but Frank Bones is his hero. Bones is a kind of latter-day Lenny Bruce -- he smokes crack in the dressing room, carries a knife, sharpens up his shooting skills at a gun range near LAX and manages to collect sexual trophies despite the fact that he is aging and broke. The screen saver on his computer is the Zapruder film: “Every time I boot up,” he cracks, “Kennedy’s head explodes.” Whatever flaws and failings he may have, however, Bones is redeemed in the author’s eyes by the fact that his comedy act is an exercise in relentless truth-telling -- “the man shticking in the tempest,” as Greenland artfully puts it.

Melnick, by contrast, is a former journalist and an aspiring author who stumbles into television writing and turns out to be successful at doing something he loathes. Where crack is Bones’ drug of choice, Melnick prefers to dope himself on NyQuil. While he dutifully toils on the project assigned to him by the network -- “Happy Endings,” a sitcom set in a Las Vegas massage parlor -- he is consumed with jealousy over the fact that his secretary is working on a novel, which makes her a real writer in his eyes.

Greenland, a playwright and a movie and television writer, clearly knows the terrain from firsthand experience, and we are meant to guess at the authentic celebrities and power brokers who have inspired the characters in his novel. At least one of them is so thinly disguised that the author need not have bothered to give him a fictional name -- the “cranky misanthrope” called Phil Sheldon is Larry David, and “The Fleishman Show” is “Seinfeld.” In fact, the book seems to have been inspired by the surprising success of David, a gifted outsider who single-handedly rewrote the mythic Hollywood success story, and he haunts the book even though his character is seldom seen or heard.

Melnick, for example, is a seven-year veteran of “The Fleishman Show,” a fact that explains why he has been given a lucrative deal at the “Lynx” network: “Lloyd had had virtually nothing to do with the triumph of the endeavor,” the author explains. “This did not stop other television studios, desperate to re-create the otherworldly success of ‘The Fleishman Show’ and not understanding it was sui generis, from throwing piles of money at ‘Fleishman Show’ writers, whose primary, often sole, qualification was having been in a room with Phil Sheldon.”

Bones, too, is a comedy genius, but an unappreciated and under-compensated one, precisely because he is also a purist who finds himself unable to make the compromises that the entertainment industry demands of its front men. From the very first page, the author allows us to see that Bones is a ticking time bomb, an unstable mix of sexual energy, psychological dysfunction and moral ambiguity. And yet, even though we know that he is doomed, nothing quite prepares us for the fate that awaits him. Suffice it to say that when Bones crashes and burns, it is a spectacular but also heart-rending sight to see.

Behind the happy facade of prime-time television -- “an unbreakable rhythm of line-line-joke, line-line-joke, ad infinitum,” as Greenland puts it -- some disturbing and even dangerous emotions are at work. “The goofy-seeming fellow in the casual clothes who writes all those funny things the cute black kid says in the hit show is more often than not consumed with a rage that, in another context, would lead to flying fists, broken glass, and the burning of Atlanta,” he explains. “But in the fluorescent rooms where sitcoms are brought to life by these socially maladroit young men and women, the boundless irritation felt by the shtickticians will undergo an alchemic process resulting in entertainment palatable to the viewing public.”

A few generational and cultural disconnects can be glimpsed in the pages of “The Bones,” but they say more about the state of American book publishing than they do about the author’s prose style. Now and then, Greenland’s editor seems to have compelled him to pause and explain a reference that a younger reader might find baffling. Thus, for example, Greenland breaks off the story -- otherwise so taut and tense, so smart and funny -- to deliver a wooden aside about such political events and pop culture phenomena as the Camp David accords or Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man.”

Another odd bounce in “The Bones” is the way that Greenland depicts the female characters. Both Melnick’s wife and Bones’ girlfriend are outrageous users and climbers, the former a “social mountaineer” who aspires to the Hollywood aristocracy and the latter a former soft-core porn star who is willing to settle for a role in a sitcom, and both of them wholly dependent on men to get what they want. Stacy Melnick, for example, is moved to tears by the sight of the 12-jet shower and the crystal chandelier in the jewel-box of a bathroom in their new home.

“Are you thinking about what all this is costing me?” asks Lloyd. “No,” replies Stacy, adding: “I just never thought I would ever have a bathroom this beautiful.”

The only woman we are intended to fully admire, in fact, is an Oklahoma bartender with the colorful and symbolic name of Mercy Madrid. She shows up in the final, breathless episode, when “The Bones” suddenly morphs into a noirish murder mystery with a whole new cast of characters, and it’s hard to imagine her in the same world -- or the same book -- as Stacy Melnick. And, tellingly, Mercy is the kind of woman that only a Hollywood writer could dream up: She’s both sexy and sexually available, she carries a switchblade and knows how to use it, and she announces that the book that changed her life was Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” which she picked up because she thought it was a sex story.

Still, “The Bones” is a winning and endearing book, a laugh-out-loud satire and a page turner with a big-bang ending. Indeed, Greenland shows himself a worthy successor to such past masters of the Hollywood novel as Nathanael West and Budd Schulberg. But the novel to which “The Bones” is best compared is Mordecai Richler’s enduring masterpiece of middle-age angst and pop-culture meltdown, “St. Urbain’s Horseman,” and that’s the highest praise that can be bestowed on Greenland’s remarkable debut novel. *