Hustler

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE RETURN OF MR. HOLLYWOOD

by Josh Greenfeld

Doubleday; 310 pages; $15.95

A philandering, drug-taking, crony-swindling rat of a ulm director comes back to Brooklyn for the funeral of his unbeloved mother and sets out on a three-day debauch that ends in the psychosomatic equivalent of a heart attack. That is not, perhaps, the stuff of box-office comedy, and, as a portrait of Hollywood, it seems less satire than neorealism. Yet by the final fadeout, Josh Greenfeld's novel turns out to be both uproariously funny and bitter as wormwood.

Greenfeld convincingly evokes the terrain where he has lived for more than a decade, winning an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of his novel Harry and Tonto and psychic bruises from the failures of unluckier projects. In the Freudian setting of a studio men's room, producers trade angst-drenched conversation about whose career is bigger. Aging men who cannot control their appetites go in search of one-night stands and "kosher diet tacos." A rabbi pronouncing a eulogy reaches his apogee with the solemn question, "And who of us does not love show business?"

The narrative deftly moves through the straits of midlife: the death of a parent and the consequent yearning to define and understand the past; the urge to turn over a ream of new leaves and the inability to change a single bad habit; the fear of mortality and the resulting impulse toward adolescent excess. Merely as a balancing act, the medley of tones would be impressive.

But there is more. Greenfeld's antihero, Larry Lazar, is not a conventionally Philistine tycoon, trampling on the souls of artists. He is an artist, an acclaimed creator of humanistic films who just happens to be, personally, a creep. He would rather betray a friend than lose a deal. When Lazar feels a charitable impulse and gives money to the less fortunate, he connives to get the studio to pay him back. And he is not merely greedy. He is, as a colleague remarks, "an aesthetic hustler" who looks upon every intimate--even his unlamented mother--as movie "material."

Repulsive as Larry Lazar often is, he maneuvers so clumsily that he has a certain bearlike charm. Moreover, his victims are in their ways equally ravenous for sex, money and fame, and as eager to use Lazar as he is to use them. Mira, an old girlfriend, resumes a romance only to take back a now valuable piece from her early career as a sculptor. Michael, a lesbian, seduces Lazar in order to get him to read her screenplay. Sidney Stein, a novelist, invites Lazar to his home for dinner merely to lure him out into the woods and beat him up as revenge for double-dealing in a joint film project. Allen, a friend from youth, makes a homosexual pass and later tries to borrow $5,000. Even Lazar's rich Uncle Irving seems less interested in mourning his dead sister than haggling over the cost of her funeral: "This can't be the price . . . The cemetery isn't that far. If she was alive we could all walk there."

Despite this exuberance, the novel might have benefited from more scenes with the only character sufficiently outsize to compete with the film maker: his driving, obsessive mother. The focus of the novel is Larry Lazar's awareness that his whole life has been a vain effort to win her explicit approval, and in her too brief scenes she dominates the story as effectively as she rules the family around her. Still, there is not a false note in the whole shrill song, and in its balanced skewering of Brooklyn and Beverly Hills, The Return of Mr. Hollywood may launch a new genre: the bicoastal novel. --By William A. Henry III