Beverly Hills Adjacent”

Jennifer Steinhauer

BEVERLY HILLS ADJACENT

By Jennifer Steinhauer and Jessica Hendra

307 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95

Jessica Hendra
Judith Newman will be the author of “You Make Me Really feel Like an Unnatural Girl: Diary of a New (Older) Mom.”

In Hollywood, it really is fair to say, attention is electrical power; consideration is funds. It can be the currency from the land. Providing it, obtaining it and losing it might become the central dramas of existence.

At least if you’re an actor. And certainly, if you’re Mitch Gold, the moderately handsome, moderately famous, not-quite-a-lead who measures his place in the Hollywood food chain by the size of his trailer and the brand of chocolate in his gift basket. In “Beverly Hills Adjacent” (the title refers to the real estate of those who have not quite arrived, right next to the Promised Land) it's pilot season, and the natives are restless. Mitch’s latest mediocre sitcom has committed network-assisted suicide,Cheap Windows 7 Home Basic, and if he doesn’t get another role, his powerful agency, where he hangs by a thread, will drop him. And then? The downward spiral toward roles as wacky neighbors, recurring ex-husbands, “Law and Order” corpses or, God forbid, in television infomercials.
Mitch’s wife, June, a literature professor at U.C.L.A., has long been trying to make her peace with this world — and failing miserably. Her once-doting husband is distracted; veering between publish and perish, she’s heading for the latter; and the Juicy Couture-clad stay-at-home mothers at her daughter’s preschool routinely shun her. Why can’t she be more like Larissa, the scheming wife of Willie Dermot, Mitch’s archrival for dad and boss roles? A former actress whose full-time job is now finding her husband work, Larissa gets in the mood by fantasizing about a Peter Som dress during ###### and hides her Hummer in the garage while parking a Prius in the driveway.
The first-time novelists Jennifer Steinhauer (the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times) and Jessica Hendra (whose 2005 memoir detailed her charges of abuse against her father, the comedy writer Tony Hendra) have a gift for Hollywood vapidspeak: “Fat will be the new skinny for men,Windows 7 Professional 64,” Mitch’s agent says, when the comedian Wayne Knight — real actors make cameo appearances throughout the book — beats out Mitch for a part. They also have a firm grasp of the politics of the entertainment industry. “From Larissa’s point of view, all tactics were honest during pilot season. Deals were made behind people’s backs, networks lied, friends replaced each other on shows, and in her mind, wives who were doing their part tied up the loose ends that managers and agents forgot,” the authors write. “It was Hollywood diplomacy, really, not so unlike what Condi Rice, one of her role models, would do.”
June turns to the producer and smooth operator Rich Friend, seemingly the only man in Los Angeles not repelled by an intellectual. Anyone who’s ever been chronically ignored by a spouse can understand the heady aphrodisiac that is consideration. But readers are meant to know everything they possibly could about him from his first gift to his new paramour: a first-edition copy of Auden’s poems, which he presents by quoting his favorite line: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.” He may as well be twirling his well-oiled mustache. Overshadowed by his much more successful wife, Friend likes to exercise what electrical power he has over the Little People. Bummer that one of those little people turns out to become June’s husband,Windows 7 Sale, Mitch.
As a satire, “Beverly Hills Adjacent”has that shooting-fish-in-a-barrel really feel. Still, we New Yorkers can’t help appreciating the facile Los Angeles/New York comparisons. (Los Angeles is “where everyone was trying to Botox, exercise and juice-fast his way toward immortality,Windows 7 Home Basic Product Key,” while New York is “where people ate and drank and stayed out late, accepting the joyous toll of life.”) And it is a nice twist on chick lit for the moral compass of the story to be not just an actor,Office Home And Student 2010 Key, but a guy: Mitch Gold, all-around mensch. Unfortunately that very decency, which precipitates Mitch’s awakening and a reverse-Hollywood fairy-tale ending, can really feel as genuine as a sitcom laugh track. Pity. If “Beverly Hills Adjacent” should turn into a film script (as is probably intended), one senses it may possibly linger in turnaround.