EX-LOVER

by Eleanor Bergstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 1989

Screenwriter and novelist Bergstein (Dirty Dancing; Advancing Paul Newman, 1973) spins a far-fetched yarn about the fine line between life and death: a grief-haunted playwright accepts a magazine assignment to visit a movie set, only to get entwined in the slow death of a lover and a grisly murder. Jesse Gerard, a 33-year-old playwright consumed by thoughts of death, walks onto a bustling movie set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, thinking it will be just the task to plunge her back into life. In the past year, the cerebral Jesse has lost her mother, her father, and her best friend, so she plans to weave together a quirky, on-the-scene magazine piece that is suffused with the benign good humor of one who has suffered much. After all, she is an emotionally scarred survivor writing about a movie that is about a survivor (a woman haunted by her mother's concentration camp ordeal)--except that the movie stars the notoriously superficial Sylvie. Jesse's introspective approach to her project almost shatters on the day she impulsively pushes a rolling gurney off its tracks, seriously injuring a stunt woman. But Jesse completely surpresses her role in the ""accident,"" concentrating instead on her burgeoning love affair with the magnetic director of photography. Despite her own happy marriage, Jesse obsesses about this golden-haired young man--even befriending his young production-assistant girlfriend to learn more about her lover. In between assignations, she also grows closer to Sylvie, seeing more and more similarities between the star and herself. When Jesse learns her lover has cancer and only a few months to live, however, her passionate idyll turns into a weird and confusing journey into evil and illusion--ending in an arbitrary and gruesome murder. An enormously convoluted and indulgent book. Bergstein seems to mean this as a kind of meditation on the arbitrary nature of death, but her fragmentary, subjective approach, instead of deftness, has the sloppy feel of a rough draft, full of holes. A definite pass.

Pub Date: June 20, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION