The Assistants : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Hollywood of Yesterday
Review: Though this book is pretty new it's already dated in significant ways. It must have been written in the brief minute when the five men on "QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY" were popular. Now they're over, it's over, and from the results of the national election, gay is definitely unpopular. Bret Easton Ellis, who recommends this book on the jacket copy, is a writer of permanent value, I think he must have liked this book for its pleasant locales and its roman a clef perspective into the married life of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. However even they're now broken up and so the book has a kind of musty odor already. But that is the peril of all Hollywood writers. For although nothing really changes in Hollywood, the fads do, and since Robin Lynn Williams is satirizing nothing else, she has a quaintness to her like a book written by Anita Loos or Lillian Gish about the Hollywood of their youth.

It wasn't so funny when Griffin, the guy who's not really gay, compares a minor character to a "pissed off Buckwheat." But any reader will be impressed with the way Williams, once a PA herself, can dip in and out of five different first person narratives and make them different from each other. She doesn't do well with men's voices, but that's okay, it's always interesting to see what women think men think like!

In addition, the device (pioneeered in Mexican telenovelas and countless graphic novels) of helping the reader to imagine what your character looks like, by inserting actual photos of them, is a neat one. Soon newspapers will catch on to this, and TV.