First Fiction

“Hannah, I’ll never eat lasagna again unless it’s yours.” So writes Alton Reece, fictional renegade biographer of Howard Hughes, near the beginning of Steven Carter’s bizarre, disjointed and mostly entertaining sendup of the parasitic relationship between biographer and subject. The Hannah in question is one of Reece’s long-suffering assistants, listed in the delightfully off-the-wall “Acknowledgments” that get this curious novel underway. As a target of satire, the run-on nature of contemporary book acknowledgments is as fat and slow as Hughes’ infamous Spruce Goose, and Carter makes sure to blow it clear out of the sky, with shots at Knopf and the MacArthur Foundation thrown in for good measure.

When Reece finally gets down to business narrating the life of the Hollywood mogul, aviation pioneer and notorious eccentric, we discover that, naturally, he’s freed himself from the hidebound strictures of traditional narrative: What follows is a cut-and-paste job by a hilariously pompous and lazy biographer who insists he’s a writer, not a journalist, whose interviews with aging Hughes associates trail off into discussions about screenplay options, and whose attempts at exposition bog down in the logistical minutiae of motel rooms and retirement homes.

Somehow a portrait of Hughes, accurate or not, emerges: rigging a Mercedes so it falls apart when driven by Ava Gardner, landing a plane on a Connecticut golf course to impress Katharine Hepburn, attempting to pull off a wedding whose principals are disguised as duck hunters. If there’s a Rosebud here, it’s the mysterious coffin-shaped box that traveled everywhere with Hughes and may have contained nothing more than feminine hygiene products and Red Ryder comic books.

Reece never does find out what was inside. But he manages to have an affair with an interviewee’s daughter and goes bankrupt. It seems, after all, that Reece is one of those “soul-murdering bastards” Hughes was always so worried about -- or is he? Reece is such a slippery character that, like Hughes, he remains goofy and unknowable. The same could be said of this mordant, silly and willfully enigmatic book.

*

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters

Elisabeth Robinson

Little, Brown: 328 pp., $23.95

Who writes letters anymore? In Elisabeth Robinson’s fluent first novel, apparently independent film producers do. If this were an idea meeting, you might be involuntarily passing coffee through your nose right now. But Robinson is crafty enough to get us to hang up our disbelief long enough to sell us on the premise that Olivia Hunt -- recently fired from Universal, evicted from her apartment and hustling to sell to skeptical executives a motion picture version of Don Quixote -- actually does write letters. What’s more miraculous is that the letters are copious, insightful, by turns angry and funny, occasionally scribbled on airplanes crisscrossing the country and mailed from her parents’ home in Shawnee Falls, Ohio, where her younger sister, Madeleine, has been diagnosed with acute leukemia.

The tragedy of Madeleine’s ordeal plays off against the all-encompassing hassles of Hollywood. If Madeleine’s struggle has removed Olivia for weeks at a stretch from making the rounds of the studios (she spends as much time as she can in Ohio), it also endows her with a carpe diem swagger: She’s not above firing off brown-nosing letters to Robin Williams or driving a rival’s Rolls into the Pacific Ocean.

Early in the book, Olivia writes to her father that she’s “akimbo on Hollywood’s bunny hill.” Toward the end, Olivia is still akimbo: Being a producer is what she does, quixotically or not, and a brush with family tragedy isn’t going to make, say, a yoga instructor out of her. You might suspect Robinson, herself a producer and screenwriter, of a certain callousness for juxtaposing chemotherapy and the life-and-death tribulations of location scouting. But she’s dazzling enough to make us fall, against our better judgment, for the notion of a quill-happy Hollywood producer with a poetic heart.