The Return of the Player

If you live in Los Angeles, you must read this book NOW. And then you'll have to leave. One hit with a bullet. Anyone who doesn't love this book doesn't know Los Angeles. End of story. Michael Tolkin: we are not worthy. Ignore the assembled idiots. You know what you've done is mighty.

This sequel to The Player follows in the tradition of such 19th century novelists as Dostoevsky or George Eliot, as Michael Tolkin fashions a dead-on moral tale of the high-end lives of the Hollywood rich and powerful. Griffin Mill is back. He's 52 now, and down to his last $6 million, he's almost broke. Carrying a guilty secret, he's still capable of ruthlessly doing what is necessary to get ahead. Tolkin is a terrific writer. This book isn't just about Hollywood. It shows us what's rotten about money-lusting America.

Griffin Mill has come along way since that last scene in "The Player" where he drives up to the waiting (and pregnant) June Gudmundsdottir at their quintessential happy ending Hollywood movie home. Mills waves to June as he talks on his car phone about "the best movie ever made" in reference to his murdering a screenwriter and not getting caught. In "The Return of The Player" Griffin's life has evolved to a unique love triangle complicated with Griffin's children from both mothers, a movie mogul where the rewards and toys have exponentially increased, and a new level of paranoia where global warming is the least of our worries. His secret act of murder in "The Player" continues to complicate his life. I read this sequel with the movie's "The Player" characters in mind trying to picture how Robert Altman will shoot it. The book was fun to read; the movie will be even more fun to watch.

Fans of Michael Tolkin's 1988 novel THE PLAYER and the 1992 Robert Altman film based on that story will greet the return of its antihero Griffin Mill with enthusiasm, while new readers will find themselves engaged by this entertaining black comedy set in the surreal world of present-day Hollywood. Having literally gotten away with murder in THE PLAYER, one might think that 52-year-old Griffin Mill would be grateful to be a free man, recommending scripts for new movies in his $1.5 million-a-year studio executive job and living with his former mistress, Lisa, now his wife and mother of his third child. Instead, he's tormented by the implosion of his net worth to a mere $6 million in the dotcom bust, and his vanished libido, made even more troubling by his allergy to Viagra. He's also haunted by a free-floating malaise that oscillates between the poles of personal anxiety and worry about mankind's slide toward inevitable catastrophe. "This is it?" he muses, reflecting on the emptiness of his life. "Right turns on red light, homework, some kind of accommodation with death, some kind of theology to overcome envy, some kind of gesture in the direction of making the world better, a little charity, and, other than that, trying not to let your bad feelings spoil someone else's day or --- not anything so remote as a day --- a minute, a moment." In desperation, Griffin hatches a scheme to ingratiate himself with Phil Ginsberg, a mysterious self-made media entrepreneur and "the most purely frightening person Griffin knew in Hollywood." Ginsberg suffers from his own financial angst: he wants to turn a fortune of a mere $750 million into a meaningful $4 billion so that, if he chooses, he can "buy ten fighter jets and make war on Guatemala." Griffin attracts his attention by making an extravagant and nearly unaffordable gift to the private school fundraising campaign Ginsberg is spearheading and shows he's even willing to kill again to achieve his goals. But instead of offering Griffin a conventional job, Ginsberg gives him an enigmatic secretary and places a rocking chair in an office with no phone, no computer, not even a desk. "I want you to think about things that I can't even imagine," he says. "I want you to look at your life, your own life, as the life of the world." He encourages Griffin to bring to bear his movie world experience to "look for a story," hoping that Griffin will help him find a "bruised business" he can transform into a source of vast wealth for both of them. Meanwhile, Griffin's home life is unraveling even faster than his professional one. He fantasizes about sex with his ex-wife, June, who visits Goth dance clubs and flirts with Mormonism. And he's forced to deal with the consequences of Lisa's titanic meltdown when their daughter Willa throws a temper tantrum during a routine shopping trip. The episode threatens to derail Griffin's budding career and inspires June to propose a new domestic arrangement that, despite its oddity, so

I just finished Return of the Player. It's terrific. The book is rich in ideas about marriage, divorce, children, fidelity, money, honesty, storytelling, Jews, Hollywood. Tolkin's insight into the religious/psychological/cultural-sexual nexus is bracing. I almost wish this book wasn't tied to The Player; it's about more important issues than the earlier work. And as reward for finishing a quick read, you get to have a candid moment over cigar and brandy with Bill Himself.