Pool

by Ajay Sahgal

Overview

'Mad scientist Ajay Sahgal has set out to test the validity of the proposition that nature abhors a vacuum by sending movie star Emery Roberts, to rustic Vermont...As a group portrait of young Hollywood, Pool is absolutely convincing and authentic. Sahgal knows the tribal language and rituals--the cigarette after the gym, the vanity production company, the agentspeak. And in Emery Roberts he has given us a pure portrait of the pop idol as empty vessel.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802133434
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/28/1995
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	4.98(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.63(d)

What People are Saying About This

Jay McInerney

"As a group portrait of young Hollywood, Pool is absolutely convincing and authentic."

Jill Eisenstadt

"Cristp, spare, cool, Pool finally shows us Hollywood stripped of its trappings. Take note of Ajay Sahgal."

Eve Babitz

"I'll never look at a movie star in exactly the same way. Plus this book is so mean and wild it really cheers you up. Mesmerizing."

Editorial Reviews

``Having a little existential crisis, are we? . . . I think I should tell you it's been done before.'' Thus friend and reluctant host Jeremiah aptly pronounces the emotional bankruptcy not only of weltschmerz -y 20-something megastar Emery Roberts, on the run from his current film, his lover and his life in general, but also of this glib debut novel's account of his troubles. Although Emery flees to the sweltering New England summer, he brings with him a dense Hollywood smog of dropped names and industry backbiting, and an incestuous tangle of relationships where the boundaries between business and the personal are lost to sight. Emery's porous sanctuary is a Vermont farmhouse peopled by other Hollywood exiles, none of them happy, none of them free, none of them content. Unfortunately, none of them--alcoholic poor little rich girl, embittered sidelined agent, etc.--is very interesting either, and Emery's own drained, affectless musings can't redeem them from the superficiality to which Sahgal's dialogue-dominated prose, appropriately adopting the lucid, declarative calm of a screenplay, condemns them. That these characters are trapped in a world of surfaces is of course the point--and Sahgal's central metaphor, a redundant lakeside swimming pool, whose excavation the motley gang's dissipated, debilitated energies cannot complete, rams it home--but while Sahgal is a first rate purveyor of Variety in-jokes, as a novelist he has yet to venture out of the shallow end. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Described as The Day of the Locust meets Generation X, this first novel by a Californian friendly with brat packers literary and cinematic aims barbs at the heart of Hollywood.

Library Journal