Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Oakdale Library | FICTION GRE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A hysterically scathing first novel about ambition and its discontents.
Frank Bones is a self-destructive, take-no-prisoners, bad boy comic whose recent stage stunt with a firearm has cost him his audience and his bookings. Back at the bottom rung, Frank has no choice but to take his gigs where he can get them until, by virtue of a Hollywood miracle, he gets a call from his manager. A network has offered Frank his own sitcom, but there's only one problem with this long-awaited shot at success: Frank has to play an Eskimo, and ride an animatronic walrus.
Desperate, Frank calls on Lloyd Melnick, a long lost acquaintance whose position on the smash hit The Fleishman Show has made him the hottest comedy writer in town-even though he has never actually written a single episode. If Lloyd signs on as the head writer, Frank can have any kind of show he wants. But Lloyd is tired of his gilded trappings-the network job, the Brentwood mansion-and his social-climbing wife has left him mystified and unmoored. He would trade it all in for just a sliver of Frank's notorious recklessness or artistic integrity. When Lloyd turns Frank down, the consequences involve a crashed Hummer, corrupt police officers, enraged ex-husbands, sultry bartenders, and high-speed chases to Mexico and back.
A brilliant satire, The Bones is a stunning debut that reveals, in all its hilarity and ache, the dark heart of comedy.
Author Notes
Seth Greenland is an award-winning playwright. He has also written extensively for film and television. This is his first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Be grateful for what you have. That's the moral of playwright/television writer Greenland's first novel, but what a wildly circuitous, over-the-top route we take to arrive at it. A pitch-perfect sendup of Hollywood's endemic self-importance, the brilliantly acid narrative centers on two characters, a rebellious Lenny Bruce-like comedian named Frank Bones (he fondly refers to himself in the third person, hence the title), and Lloyd Melnick, a highly successful TV comedy writer. The two became acquainted in New York when Melnick, then a struggling journalist, wrote a profile of the up-and-coming Bones. Greenland reunites the pair years later after Melnick scores a huge contract writing for a network and Bones comes calling, asking for Melnick's help writing a sitcom based on the comedian's own life (his only other prospect is a role as a sitcom Eskimo). Melnick, who is grappling with his success and desperately struggling to write something meaningful of his own, turns Bones down, a snub that sets off a crazy chain reaction that results in a Hummer parked in the living room of Melnick's posh manse followed by a classic cops-and-robbers run for the border. Greenland keeps his foot firmly on the gas, and the book's pace is fast, furious and fun. The author slows down enough along the way to expound intelligently on topics ranging from self-knowledge to "the anxiety of affluence," but the pace of this raucous thrill ride never slackens. Agent, Henry Dunow. (Mar. 14) FYI: Film rights have been sold to Sony, with David Mamet set to helm. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Life on the road has become all but unbearable for aging hipster comedian Frank Bones. Relegated to playing ever-smaller clubs in backwater towns since he pointed a loaded gun at a heckler, he is beginning to think his salvation lies in television. His devoted agent, convinced that Frank is a gifted comic, gets him a deal, but there's a slight hitch--Frank has to play an Eskimo. He becomes convinced that the script will only work if it's penned by his old friend Lloyd Melnick, now a big-shot TV writer. Lloyd, however, increasingly disillusioned by the crushing banality of network television, has decided to write a novel. With gleeful insider knowledge, TV and film writer Greenland sends up the conventions of the business, taking potshots at trophy wives, exorbitant salaries, palatial estates, and, most especially, comedy writers. Employing both broad strokes (a vengeful Frank drives a yellow Hummer through Lloyd's living room) and polished, extremely funny one-liners, Greenland takes readers on an entertaining, behind-the-scenes tour of sitcoms and their socially maladroit, dyspeptic creators. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2005 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Meet Frank Bones, the comedian's comedian. His smart, in-your-face, insulting style of stand-up comedy has given him a relatively successful career on the club circuit, but he has never managed to make that shift into mainstream entertainment. As if by a miracle, a new TV network offers him his own sitcom. The catch is that they want Frank to play an Eskimo sent on wild adventures, riding a giant walrus across the frozen tundra. The author takes every opportunity to satirize the glitz and glam of Hollywood and provides skilled characterizations of everyone, from empty-headed pretty boys to social-climbing wives. His over-the-top characters will make readers both laugh and think. Even the Bones, womanizing, drug-using jerk that he is, comes off as surprisingly likable through the quick wit and patter he brings to every scene. In a last-ditch effort to reach success on his own terms, he calls Lloyd Melnick, an old acquaintance who has just come off a run as a writer on the massive hit The Fleishman Show, to pitch the idea of a sitcom based on himself. But Melnick is burned out and turns him down. The Bones's anger sends him spiraling out of control and on a frenzied trip involving corrupt cops, murder, running the border into Mexico, and, yes, even a love subplot. The man's energy takes this funny, exciting story into a surprisingly moving conclusion about dreams, desire, and finally growing up.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Comedy is not pretty for either writers or performers in playwright/television writer Greeland's exuberant, massively untidy first novel. Frank Bones has been the reigning bad boy of American standup for ages, but he's never scored with a wider audience. At 48, Frank still has the comic reflexes, the dark vision ("people are evil") and the lovely live-in, Hot Ninja Bounty Hunters cult star Honey Call. But Frank wants more; he wants his own TV show, a series that's all about him and no one else. The Lynx Network, however, doesn't want to bankroll My Life and High Times; they want Frank to star in Kirkuk, whose head writer, Orson Dubinsky, promises to make it "an apocalyptic-spaghetti-noir half-hour Eskimo thing." When golden Hollywood hack Lloyd Melnick turns down Frank's groveling request to write a pilot for My Life and High Times, he sets in motion a plot that suggests Rube Goldberg in a wind tunnel. It's obvious from the many barely disguised portraits of studio princelings and hangers-on in this roman à clef that Greenland has made some important discoveries about Hollywood: Stars and writers alike are really ambitious; they're obsessed with money, sex, and power even when they're trying to raise money for their pet charities; they're all pitifully insecure; and the most successful of them aren't necessarily the most talented. For the first two-thirds of his tale, Greenland floats some extremely funny one-liners on a cantus firmus drawn from Jackie Collins, Michael Tolkin, and Tom Wolfe. But a sequence barely adapted from The Bonfire of the Vanities sends Frank on a downward spiral to Tulsa, and the plot, juiced by a spectacularly unconvincing homicide, goes even further into deep space until it drifts out too far to recall. An often hilarious kitchen sink of a debut, one more example of a satire providing new examples left and right of the excesses it thinks it's condemning. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The curious nature of contemporary fame and of those itching to bask in its golden glow drive the characters in this first novel by playwright and screenwriter Greenland. Frank Bones (a.k.a. The Bones, Dem Bones) is a stand-up comic notorious for a meltdown during a performance that ended with him firing shots through the roof. It got him a spread in People, but now his only gigs are in places like Peoria, IL. When Frank gets a shot at a TV series-so what if he's playing an Eskimo and riding an animatronic walrus?-he rightly sees it as his last one. Frank enlists the aid of comedy writer Lloyd Melnick, who was helped by Frank early in his career. The ups and downs of this mismatched pair on the greased pole of fame make for a satirical look at the world of entertainment. A sort of cross between Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sideways, this will entertain those looking for an insider's view of "the business." At 401 pages, though, it's guaranteed to exhaust anyone used to the pithiness of a People article. For larger fiction collections.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
