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Summary
Summary
Our Town is the debut of a striking literary voice, one that captures the disillusion at the fringes of Hollywood as seen through a haze of drugs, alcohol, abuse, and fallen aspirations. An unseen narrator guides us through the dark fairy tale of Dorothy White, an aspiring actress who "never quite figured how to get out of her own way." Her perfect marriage to an equally golden actor, Dale, quickly turns into one of jealousy and violence. Dorothy ends the marriage yet begins a legacy ofself-destruction for the failed couple, as well as their two children, Clover and Dylan.
But we see the pathos in Dorothy's attempts to get back on track, to be a good woman, mother, and grandmother. Throughout the novel, she is left in the wake of decisions that turn disastrous. Her downward spiral from elusive fame into consistent infamy--a series of DUIs, the continuing neglect of her children, a string of failed and unhealthy relationships--is not without its grace, with the warmth of her character shining through her spackled makeup and cloud of acrid perfume.In many ways, Dorothy White is an anti-heroine for the ages--"vanilla voiced," bewigged, loving, and ever radiant --a sympathetic character caught in the riptide of her transformation from small-town southern girl to one-time toast of Hollywood to embarrassing tabloid fodder.
Our Town is an original and startling debut novel, one whose fresh voice and expert perspective reinvents the Hollywood story for a new generation of readers.
Author Notes
Kevin McEnroe was born in Los Angeles to actress Tatum O'Neal and athlete John McEnroe. He was raised in New York and graduated from Columbia University with an MFA. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The debut novel from McEnroe is a shocking tale of addiction and family disintegration that takes place at the margins of the entertainment industry. Dorothy and Dale are young actors who meet when they are cast in the pilot of a 1960s television show. They fall in love, marry, and have two children: Clover and Dylan. Dorothy's career founders just as Dale's begins to rise. Both drink and take drugs; soon jealousy and abuse have wrecked the marriage. Dale lives the life of a playboy while Dorothy slips further into addiction and obscurity, and most of the novel is concerned with her long downward slide: she takes up with a teenage boyfriend, neglects her children, moves on to harder drugs, and becomes a progressively greater embarrassment to her ex-husband and her children. Though McEnroe has a gift for crafting scenes of familial horror (such as when teenage Dylan curls up at his mother's feet while she injects heroin), the relentlessness of Dorothy's march from degradation to degradation is exhausting. The icy narration strives for clarity, but ultimately the novel offers a shallow analysis of self-destruction. Clover, who seems to have mostly escaped her family's calamities, is the novel's most realized and interesting character, but her best scenes are too late to balance the overall work. McEnroe has undeniable talent; his next book will be one to watch out for. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
If Ernest Hemingway had chosen to write about late-20th-century Hollywood while wearing Tennessee Williams' sunglasses, the result might read very much like this. McEnroe, the son of Oscar-winning actress Tatum O'Neal and tennis superstar John McEnroe, brings to his first novel a shrewd, melancholy knowledge of celebrity and its discontents. It tracks the descent of Hollywood actress Dorothy White from her charmed, promising youth to dismal, mortifying late-middle age. The Georgia-bred Dorothy is described early on as "a B-movie actress who only briefly experienced any true success, her beauty and her vanilla voice and her appetite for proper living earn[ing] her, almost, infamy." But she also wanted to be "a good woman. A good wife, and a good mother. And a good grandmother, too." As detailed as a coroner's report, but with the delicacy of a romantic elegy, the book spans decades in its description of Dorothy's best and worst impulses; her penchant for relationships with abusive men, beginning with her more successful movie-star husband, Dale; and, most poignantly, how her addictions to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs abet her physical and emotional decline. The book abounds in rich descriptions of the Southern California landscape, whether of grand Hollywood parties or of a seedy off-track betting parlor in Ventura. Those who know about McEnroe's family history will find it next-to-impossible not to be haunted while reading by the memory of his actress grandmother, Joanna Moore (1934-1997), with whom Dorothy shares several biographic details. Yet it's a measure of McEnroe's promise as a writer that his main character transcends real-life memories to become a vivid, enrapturing personality in her own right. McEnroe's writing style is felicitously hard-boiled, by turns tender and sardonic, but never less than compassionate toward an ill-starred woman who "never quite figured out how to get out of her own way." The novel often evokes the twilight graces of a classic pop ballad, each lyric evoked with care in a cocktail lounge by a soft, sultry voice etched with pain. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Set in Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century, McEnroe's debut takes its name from the 1938 Thornton Wilder play and similarly features an omniscient narrator. This observer recounts the life of Dorothy White, a southern girl who moves to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming an actress. Dorothy's career soon takes a backseat to her romance with Dale Kelley, a matinee-idol handsome actor she meets on the set of a TV pilot. Their fairy-tale courtship leads to a marriage that is anything but happily ever after, as Dale becomes abusive, and Dorothy turns to alcohol and drugs to cope. When they finally separate, their two children become a point of contention between them, with Dale finally getting custody of both after Dorothy is arrested for drunk driving. Despite her many flaws, Dorothy never stops trying to revive her acting career, to be close to her children, to find a soulmate. Like the play it's named for, McEnroe's moving first novel stirs up nostalgia for a time gone by.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2015 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
This was Dorothy's first acting job. And it was Dale's, in fact, as well. He'd done some theater in high school ---- but certainly nothing that ever paid. And she got hired for her looks and charisma and, most importantly, her accent. The role required a specific regional dialect, and her meter just seemed right. And so the first time they acted they did so together. And they were both nervous. But more excited, still, because they were both new to acting, and had gotten into it because they were pretty, essentially just leashed up and led around and told what to do. Which can be disconcerting, not knowing what the future holds. But now they each knew somebody else -- somebody else like them -- things might be easier. So they ran to their marks, and they hit their cues, and they acted, for the first time, together. Teamwork, you know? And they were believable -- the swooning cheerleader and the varsity wrestler had real spark. They were young, not yet over-doing it. Not yet over applying the method. Not yet overcompensating for their developing jowls. They didn't know how to act, yet. They were only being themselves. They just liked to be around each other and their viewership, watching at home, believed that truth. And the confidence they built from that scene allowed them to be successful in their other scenes, with other actors. And they saw, in each other, a future. Just themselves. Themselves together. Just together. And then they were happy. Happy as baked clams. Excerpted from Our Town: A Novel by Kevin McEnroe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.