Playing on a bigger field

HOLLYWOOD novels can be divided into two categories, which, for simplicity’s sake, we will call Pulp and Art. Both examine the emptiness and pain beneath the glitz, the primary difference being that the latter are better written and usually have unhappy endings while the former can be purchased in drugstores. Rest assured that Michael Tolkin’s fourth novel, “The Return of the Player,” is not something you’ll pick up at Rite Aid.

“The Return of the Player” continues the story of Griffin Mill -- an unlikable character who, like the God of the Old Testament, can nonetheless effectively carry a book. Eighteen years ago, he anchored “The Player,” a novel that captured the Reagan-era zeitgeist, in which a high-ranking studio executive could plausibly be seen as an all-powerful being. Poised, controlled and deadly, Griffin was Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley gone Hollywood.

The movie business in which Griffin finds himself in this new book is something else altogether. With the rise of the Internet, the myriad new leisure choices available to target audiences and the recent stagnation of both box office and DVD sales, the notion of a studio executive as a commanding figure in an ever-expanding movie universe is ludicrous. Today, the Hugo Boss brigade is cowering in its mauve-toned bunkers, wondering why no one bought tickets to “Aeon Flux.”

When we meet Griffin this time, then, he is suitably consumed with dread. Although he makes an annual salary of $1.5 million as the second-ranking executive at the Studio, he is saddled with two families, two mortgages and the need to keep up appearances. In other words, he’s going broke. He is also 52, impotent and, in a devilish touch, allergic to Viagra. And he’s carrying a horrible secret.

It is one of the achievements of “The Return of the Player” that it utterly captures the most salient quality of life in Hollywood: the bowel-shaking fear that underlies everything. But Griffin’s anodyne worries, though real enough, transcend the movie business because in this novel, Tolkin is after much bigger game. Although “The Player” was a meditation on unmitigated ambition and guilt, here the author means to explicate the decline of life on the planet and the imminent death of everything. Early on, he announces that this is no ordinary Hollywood novel: “Griffin wasn’t afraid the world was coming to an end,” he writes; “no, he was in a panic because he knew the world was already ten years dead and the future was just necrosis.” Move over, Gigi Levangie Grazer; hello Michel Houellebecq!

Rather than succumb to despair, Griffin decides he must come up with a scheme that will bring in $25 million with which he can purchase an island in the Pacific where he and his loved ones can ride out the impending global cataclysm. When he meets gay tycoon Phillip Ginsberg, the proverbial lightbulb goes off above Griffin’s well-coiffed head. The novel’s plot largely concerns his machinations to get inside Ginsberg’s orbit while keeping the lid on a home situation that grows more baroque by the minute.

Among the challenges of writing a sequel is that of finding something new to say about a character readers have already come to know. In “The Return of the Player,” Tolkin admirably performs this task. Among his more inspired ideas is to place Griffin, who literally got away with murder in “The Player,” within a domestic context, which allows the author to cast a gimlet eye on the foibles of a certain kind of Los Angeles family -- that of the Deer-Valley-in-the-winter-Europe-in-the-summer income bracket.

Yet even as he performs his usual merciless vivisection, Tolkin doesn’t simply go in for the kill. In a memorable set piece at the bar mitzvah of the tycoon’s son (the drolly named Squire Ginsberg), Griffin experiences an epiphany while listening to a liturgical melody. “The moment of fellowship and feeling woven into the brightening glow of the braided candle, and the unembarrassed pleasure in the supporting touch of strangers,” Tolkin writes, “proved to Griffin that in this humility and completion -- a moment wet with melting wax, with wine, and with tears -- whoever wrote the melody understood something of the fabric of the universe, and if none of the billionaires could hear what Griffin was hearing, if the sincerity annoyed them with its denial of anyone’s superiority, perhaps, thought Griffin, I have an advantage right now.” It is to Tolkin’s credit that his character -- who killed his first wife’s boyfriend, then left her after impregnating a woman with whom he was having an affair -- experiences this in a manner devoid of irony.

Many of the novel’s flourishes evoke brittle recognition. Witness Griffin’s thoughts about an executive who ran the Studio’s classics division until his recent firing: “If you were really developed, you schmuck, you’d have made money with the classics division. You’d have made films with sex and blood instead of coffee shops. You’d have taken what you love about film noir and bought up some Korean cop movies. Or you would have made big brilliant comedies about stupidity and vanity and the way love can’t blossom until everyone, the hero especially, knows the truth about themselves.” Here, Tolkin skewers the pretentious executives who worship Palme d’Or-winning art films yet, like slow-moving herbivores, are unable to outmaneuver their more commercially minded competitors.

Tolkin, as always, is allergic to sentimentality and cant. Of the perennially venerated World War II generation, he caustically observes that it was “the greatest generation ever to raise a generation of drug addicts and compulsive shoppers.” Take that, all you guys who fought the Nazis.

One aspect of the novel that is both clever and problematic is the systematic evocation of the late Joseph Campbell, whose seminal text “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” has been a long-standing crutch for creatively challenged movie executives. Tolkin frames his own hero in a way any Campbell-drunk expense-account abuser will certainly recognize: “Griffin lacked a mentor figure, a shape shifter, and two comic spirit guides, but with a strong through-line for his super objective, he believed that the weapons he needed would come to hand when he least expected them, so long as he had faith, which he might lose at the end of the second act but which, by the third-act bump, would return.” This pitch-perfect use of facile myth lingo will make countless Hollywood denizens cringe in recognition. It is a brilliant and darkly comic stroke when Griffin, whose victim in the first book was an innocent screenwriter, begins to see himself as a character on a Campbell-style hero’s journey.

The downside of the Campbell motif, though, is that it infuses the novel with a fatal whiff of the meta, a quality that ultimately torpedoed Charlie Kaufman’s otherwise superb screenplay for “Adaptation.” Kaufman used Robert McKee’s theories of screenwriting as a satirical target and a template for his own storytelling, and here Tolkin steps into the same trap, substituting Campbell for McKee. He tips his meta-fictional hand at the outset of the book, when he quotes Edith Wharton citing something William Dean Howells told her: “... [W]hat the American public always wants is tragedy with a happy ending.”

This tragedy-with-a-happy-ending gambit worked beautifully in “The Player,” since Griffin, although he triumphs outwardly, is left with the cancer of his secret. In contrast, the ending of the new book is more theoretical than earned. If “The Return of the Player” were a movie, this would be par for the course. A novel as ambitious as this one, however, promises a little more.