No Goodbyes

With crisp writing and swift pacing, actress and writer Kagan's third novel (after The Girls) presents a vision of Hollywood that's as saucy and outrageously unrealistic as Hollywood gets, and as entertaining. The story of three women whose lives become entwined begins with Chassi Jennings, the lonely, 25-year-old celebrity ingenue who at 12 watched horrified as her movie-star mother, Sally Brash, was killed by a car in Rome. Ionie St. John is a fiery young redhead who dreams of getting her big showbiz break while she waits on tables at Cuppa Joe, serving, among others, Chassi. Eleanor Costello is a psychiatrist more despairing than many of her patients, among whom is Chassi, referred by the studio after she suffers dizzy spells during the filming of her latest movie. It's a remake of the one Sally Brash won an Oscar for, with Chassi in the starring role, and it soon becomes plain that the young actress has some unresolved guilt about her mother's death. As Chassi dissects her relationship with her mother in session after session, bitter Eleanor doodles on her pad and wonders what went sour in her relationship with her own daughter, Caroline. The only one of the trio living in the present is Ionie, who doggedly pursues her dream and whose ambition eventually brings her into Chassi's orbit as a friend. Some of the plot points are trite--Ionie's affair with a well-connected cinematographer, the transference between Chassi and Eleanor--but the three stories are convincingly woven together, and if the book has a predictable, feel-good, Hollywood ending, its colorful scenes and characters produce an engrossing read. Agent, Virginia Barber, Writers Shop. (June)