Pacific Tremors

by Richard G. Stern

Overview

Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810151314
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Stern was born in 1928 in New York City and published his first novel, Golk, in 1960. Among his twenty books are In Any Case, which won the Friends of Literature Prize; Natural Shocks, winner of the Sandburg Prize for Novel of the Year; Noble Rot: Stories 1949-1988, named the Sun-Times Book of the Year; Stitch; Other Men's Daughters; and A Sistermony, which was awarded the Heartland Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year. In 1985 he won the Medal of Merit for the Novel given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Stern is Regenstein Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Table of Contents

	Leet and Keneret: In the Pacific	5
	Keneret: To Work	17
	Spear: Audited	37
	Keneret: Shooting	59
	Spear: Grandpa	79
	Keneret: The Shooter Shot	101
	Leet: A New Way	115
	Jennifer: Downsized	125
	The Kenerets	137
	Spears and Abarbanels	149
	Spear: Abroad and Home	163
	Leet: Ups and Downs	175
	Coda: Quake	187
	Acknowledgments	191

Editorial Reviews

"Richard Stern is a deft, surprising, and thoroughly original novelist. Pacific Tremors is literate, it's smart, it's affecting. It richly succeeds." —Richard Ford



"Pacific Tremors is brilliant. It sparkles. It has some wonderful scenes, beautifully unfolded, and it builds a surprisingly sympathetic yet clear-eyed picture of a world of Hollywood moviemakers and hangers-on that challenges and undermines the stereotypes without being sentimental and without blurring its focus. In short, a fine novel." —Austin Wright, author of Tony and Susan

From the Publisher

Stern's lucidity, together with his capacity for affection and the comic, are very rare qualities.

Kubal

Stern is a craftsman par excellence.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

...Stern [can]...intrude his viewpoint upon characters young and old, women and men, and still keep them individual.

Herbert Mitgang

An obstinate...attachment to lucidity debars his work from the attention of problem-solving academics; his intelligence discourages holiday skimmers.

Julian Barnes

His writing is superb...What Henry James more elaborately was doing when people still had patience with the elaborate.

Saul Bellow

If...reading Stern requires a greater concentration than we are accustomed to apply,...the reward...is proportionately greater as well.

Mark Harris

While this debut novel, winner of the First Coast Writers Festival's Josiah W. Bancroft Jr. Award, has its faults, it deserves praise for sheer action and suspense. PI Hardin, a retired counter intelligence officer, is asked by a prominent Grand Rapids, Mich., lawyer to protect his niece from her estranged police officer husband, who is likely to beat her up on sight. The husband turns out to be the least of Hardin's worries, as the plot immediately becomes increasingly violent and complex, requiring one to pay close attention to who did what to whom and why or be lost forever. Bailey has a good sassy sense of humor. He also has a peculiar vernacular of his own. For instance, in a scene in which two characters smoke, the author writes, "He started plumbing his costume for a cigarette." Plumbing? His "costume" is a pair of overalls. A few lines later: "I took a long pull on my smoke, extracted it from my face, and looked out over the river." Now, for a bit of local color: "Popsicle sticks weathered to gray and the silver pull tabs from beverage cans littered the ground." Pull tabs on the ground? This detail would seem to set the action a generation or so ago, but in fact period and, for that matter, place are irrelevant in this hard-boiled homage, in which the villains get stacked up like cordwood. Bailey's prose can be eccentric, but there's no denying his narrative drive, which keeps the reader moving right along until the last page. Agent, Andrew Zack. (Feb. 13) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Though focused on Southern California and the film industry, this novel covers a lot of geographic and emotional ground. Renowned director Ezra Keneret and his longtime friend, film historian Wendell Spear, both realize that their creative and productive days are nearly over. The specters of physical disability and loss of vocation provide tension of one sort, while flashbacks and flash-forwards reveal familial problems. The interlacing viewpoints of the many secondary characters serve to underscore the power as well as the fragility of relationships. Mirroring the unsteady emotional condition of those living on the Pacific Rim, the title is fitting. Both Keneret and Spear are bright, sophisticated, dedicated men, even honorable for the most part. Their domestic and professional histories, as well as the inside look into movie-making, are skillfully revealed in this well-written and finely imagined novel. Stern is the Helen Regenstein Professor of English at the University of Chicago and has been publishing fiction, poems, essays, and drama since 1960. Recommended for all libraries. Jack Hafer, Chesterfield Cty. Lib. Syst., VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The twilight years of a once-young Turk in Hollywood form the core of the respected Stern's latest (Shares, 1992; a memoir, A Sistermony, 1995; etc.): an assured, affectionate, contemplative story on the end of lives well lived.

Kirkus Reviews