Chimney Rock

Startling images of Hollywood decadence and personal turmoil pervade this prodigious, literate tale of Oedipal conflict amid the pretense and excesses of the contemporary American film industry. In the tradition of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust , the novel evokes a landscape of unabashed perversion and atavism, thinly cloaked by the glamour of the silver screen. Narrator and protagonist Will Blake is a third-generation insider, a spiritual drifter who sleepwalked into movie stardom with a natural talent that has earned him three Oscar nominations. Reeling from the breakup of his marriage to world-renowned actress Zebra Dunn, nursing the permanent wound of his brother's suicide, locked in dangerous conflict with his father, Clement (a violent, monomaniacal producer), Will becomes increasingly unstable as he traces the nearly invisible line separating reality from illusion in his bizarre hometown. Smith ( The Lives of the Dead ) writes relentlessly, in waves of rich, elaborate metaphor full of fresh insights and probing speculations about a milieu so often treated superficially. Rather than invoking real-life stars, he creates his own fully imagined movieland characters, who help make the novel's vision convincing and complete. His agile, dynamic prose captures both the deep reveries and the grotesque crucibles of Will's story. Author tour. (Apr.)