Television
A Novel
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
"A glamorous, intriguing novel" (New York Times) about a jaded movie star and the two differently conflicted women in his orbit.
Some people you meet them and you imagine this movie together. The two of you make a kind of movie and then it’s over. Other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television . . . If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.
An aging, A-list movie star lotteries off the entirety of his mega-million blockbuster salary to a member of the general viewing public before taking up with a much younger model. His non-famous best friend (and often lover) looks on impassively, while recollecting their twenty-odd years of unlikely connection. And an aspiring filmmaker, unknown to them both, labors over a script about best friends and lovers while longing for the financial freedom to make great art.
Told in their alternating, intricately linked perspectives, Television is a funny, philosophically astute novel about phenomenal luck, whether windfall or chance encounter. Like Joan Didion’s classic Play It as It Lays, but speaking to a since irrevocably changed Hollywood, it portrays a culture in crisis and the disparities in wealth, beauty, talent, gender, and youth at the heart of contemporary American life. In this glittering but strange new world, lit up by social media and streaming services—what, if not love, can be counted in your favor?
With plays in chronology, bright, nimble dialogue, and a profoundly modern style, Lauren Rothery’s debut novel is an arresting feat of literary impressionism, and marks the arrival of a significant new talent to the landscape of American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rothery debuts with an ironic narrative of a disillusioned movie star who hatches a harebrained scheme to lottery off his royalties for an upcoming film to lucky moviegoers. Verity, the actor, copes with his discontent by drinking heavily and having sex with younger women. His narration comes across as a performance of self-reflection, as when he describes getting drunk on a plane and insisting to be let into the cockpit: "It's weird when you're being a belligerent asshole, but you're rich and people know who you are. It's thrilling in a horrible, obscene way." Helen, a writer who has become a friend and romantic partner, serves as a stabilizing presence in Verity's life. He thinks of her during lonely nights, and despite her ambivalence toward their undefined relationship, she remains loyal to him. In a shambolic interview with GQ, Verity announces the lottery, which is worth more than $80 million. Rothery intercuts chapters from Verity's and Helen's perspectives with an initially unconnected thread following a young writer named Phoebe, who's grappling with the loss of her grandparents and her stalled screenwriting career, and who would stand to benefit from a windfall. The story lines intersect by the end, but the fragmented structure fails to generate much urgency, despite Rothery's gimlet eye for Hollywood excess. Readers will be left scratching their heads.
