Hollywood or Bust

In 1999, when Oprah Winfrey chose Bret Lott's novel Jewel for her book club, the respected but obscure writer was catapulted from literary writer to Superstar Author. Within hours, Lott's little-known masterpiece went from No. 1,069,713 on the Amazon.com sales chart to No. 1. But though he's famous for Jewel, Lott has spent a career crafting an otherwise prodigious and highly acclaimed body of work, including seven novels, three short story collections and a memoir. Oprah may have made him famous, but Lott made himself into one of his generation's most accomplished writers.

His newest work, Ancient Highway, is a multigenerational novel told from three alternating perspectives: those of Earl Holmes, his daughter Joan and his grandson Brad. Spanning half a century, the story begins in 1925 when Earl, dreaming of Hollywood stardom, hops a freight train and leaves behind his unhappy life in "the nothing town of Hawkins, Texas." As Earl prepares to escape Texas, Lott captures a teenager's frustrations:

[H]e looked out the window of the room, and watched the night sky out there, the stars lined up same as ever, the same line of trees off in the distance on the slow march away for the logging he knew soon enough he'd call his own life. He could see in the gray and black out there a scattering of houses, all dark as his own, all peopled with lives as empty and pointless as his own, fields either growing thick with cotton or stubbled over, waiting for the next year, and the next....

As Earl's journey aboard the trains to California gets tense (thieving, violence, even murder), the story jumps to 1946 Hollywood and the perspective of 10-year-old Joan. Earl is her father, now an actor and busboy who poses on street corners, hoping a talent agent will "discover" him. Her mother, Saralee, prone to debilitating headaches, chain smokes. The three live in a two-room Hollywood apartment. Joan hears both their lovemaking and fighting, though it's the words between the whispering and the yelling that she really wants to know, the secret of how such words "can lead you to happiness, and how the same words can make you walk down a road that goes straight to sadness."

The third and least compelling voice is that of 24-year-old Brad, Joan's long-estranged son. In 1980, newly discharged from the Navy, he lands at Earl's home in the San Fernando Valley. Until he figures out what to do with his life, he decides to join his grandfather, near 70 now, in his current business of selling caftans at area flea markets. Saralee plays solitaire all day with the TV on, still chain smoking. Joan is living alone in Phoenix. Brad's mission will be to bring the family together.

The problem with Brad, though, is that we don't get the sweep and arc of his life as we do with Earl, nor the lyrical voice Lott invests in the young Joan. After Earl and Joan, he seems insubstantial. More troubling, the drama of the book's conclusion—will the three generations come together, finally, as a family?—is told through Brad's voice. A flea market scene toward the end, for example, rings embarrassingly hollow, with stock characters straight out of a Hallmark movie. One bad scene doesn't normally ruin a strong novel, but this one, because it's so pivotal to the story's resolution, taints the rest of the book and makes the final chapter seem hokier than it otherwise might.

That said, anything Lott writes, Ancient Highway included, is a better, more compelling read than 95 percent of bookstore stock. These days, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a literary writer of Lott's talent to traffic so consistently in the themes of compassion and redemption. The line, after all, between authenticity and sentimentality can be very fine. Ask Tolstoy, or Steinbeck. Lott, like most great writers, risks crossing that line every time he writes a book. His best work pushes up against it; Ancient Highway crosses it. n

Family Man Brett Lott

photo: Luke Rutan