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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Picaresque collection of interrelated stories, interviews", 23 Sep 2003
Author Steven Carter gives the Howard Hughes legend a new treatment here, creating a fictional biographer, Alton Reece, to tell a fictional story about this real man, using as sources an invented and entirely fictional bibliography. The fictional Reece interviews Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Jean Peters, and other Hughes contacts, filling the novel with detail as he personalizes the reclusive Hughes. All the interviews, notes from Hughes's "diary," quotations by Richard Nixon, memos by an FBI field agent, transcripts of tape recordings, and comments by Hughes's former employees are imaginative and often hilarious creations of the author, not real at all. Although some readers may question the propriety of basing the entire "biography" on invented quotations purportedly made by real people, the book is clearly label as fiction, and the basic information about Hughes's life is largely factual.Modesty, self-effacement, and humility are not biographer Reece's strong suits, as we note from the opening pages. His first book, Melville and the Whale, was successful, and, he tells us, he secured a seven figure advance for the Hughes biography. His assistants do the "tedious aspects of research," he doesn't get along with people at the Hughes Archives, and he accepts money from Fox TV, though, ultimately, things don't "work out." He likens his experience with the prestigious MacArthur Foundation to "dealing with a seventeenth-century French king handing out Christmas Lagniappes." As Reece recreates the downward spiral of Hughes's life, from the Hollywood days, through his confrontations with Bugsy Siegel, and to his use of a double to confuse the U.S. Government, the reader notes a parallel deterioration in Reece's own life. For anyone intrigued with the Howard Hughes story, this novel provides some unique, albeit fictional, glimpses into what might have been Hughes's thinking and into events which might have shaped his decisions. Humor, much of it slapstick, keeps the reader grounded in (fictional) reality, however much Hughes and Reece might be losing their touch, and as the novel comes to a wonderfully ironic close and author Steven Carter has the last laugh, even the most jaded reader will laugh along with him. Mary Whipple
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