My Lucky Star
by Joe Keenan
Little, Brown & Co. 361 pages, $24.95
I REALLY WASN’T EXPECTING another novel from Joe Keenan. Several years ago, he’d written two perfect farces, Blue Heaven (1988) and Putting on the Ritz (1992), featuring narrator Philip Cavanaugh and his ex-lover Gilbert Selwyn, who would always draw Philip into impossible situations, eventually to be rescued by Philip’s writing partner Claire Simmons. In these books, Keenan demonstrated a control over intricate plotting, a mastery of the comic first-person narrative voice, and a gift for loopy similes that suggested that here at last we had found, in this struggling New York writer, a P. G. Wodehouse who was actually gay. Given the sturdiness of the basic set-up, there was every reason to assume that a Wodehousian stream of novels would continue to flow.
Then disaster struck. Keenan went to Los Angeles and became a writer and eventually executive producer for a little show called Frasier, where he also wrote some perfect farces: the three episodes, for example, where Frasier, Niles, and Martin are each assumed to be gay, three ingenious variations on a well-worn theme. Comparing the rewards to be derived from a major sitcom with those from even a modestly successful gay novel, what were the chances that Keenan would go back to continuing the chronicles of Philip and Gilbert? But he has. As he says in an author’s note, Keenan worked on the novel for ten years during downtime from the show. The long labor has resulted in another seemingly effortless book, My Lucky Star, that is at least as good as its predecessors. The key to farce plotting lies in maintaining a dynamic balance between surprise and inevitability, so I’ll reveal as little as possible about the plot. Briefly, then, Gilbert drags Philip and Claire to Hollywood to write a screenplay for a film starring screen legend Diana Malenfant and her action-hero son Stephen Donato, whose career is dogged by rumors that he’s gay. The egomania of stars, the delusions of faded stars, the deceit of the ambitious, the complications of the closet, the universal leveler of lust—these are traditional engines of farce, and Keenan knows how to make them hum. He orchestrates all the plot elements until they converge in a spa where, as farce requires, the doors keep swinging open and closed, finally climaxing—literally—in a central sex scene that succeeds in being both hot and hilarious. From there, disasters spill out and multiply through the second half of the book, until, as we expected, Claire solves everything in a way that’s completely unexpected and thoroughly satisfying. The farce structure provides the comedy at the macro level. At the micro level, Keenan’s language creates a dense comic texture. Philip narrates all three books, and Keenan gives him the voice of the smart, hyperverbal gay man who’s always on and who improves a good story by wrapping it in extravagant similes. Sometimes the humor is in the unexpected aptness of the comparison: Philip explains that, when he’s nervous, “I writhe in my chair like a lap dancer in need of a pee break.” At other times, it’s that particularly gay ability to straddle high and low culture: when Diana is confronted by an unpleasant surprise, she’s “wearing an expression that called to mind Hedda Gabler as portrayed by Yosemite Sam.” Then there are lines that are funny because they’re so direct, as when Philip, having a drink with Stephen, finds that the gorgeous star’s attentiveness “was going to my head faster than the Cosmo I’d ordered as a subliminal hint that he could consider me his bitch.” One is tempted simply to quote a bunch of these lines and call it a review, but that would do a disservice to Keenan’s comic sense. Much of the humor is throwaway: not a boffo gag that stops the action, but a detail at the end of a sentence that adds an extra kick. For example, Philip and Gilbert are renting the home of a movie star who’s away on location. When they need to hide a pornographic DVD, they put it “into our landlord’s apparently unread copy of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting.” If you have been exposed to the reverence of theater types toward this sacred textbook, you can appreciate its juxtaposition with pornography; and the fact that the actor has bought the book but hasn’t read it tells its own short story about movie stars and their faint pretensions to theatrical respectability. But, because all of this is confined to half a sentence, if you don’t know the reference, you can skip right over it without feeling you’ve missed anything. There is one difference between this book and Keenan’s earlier ones. In the middle of all the low motivations and dirty deeds of nasty Hollywood types, he has plopped two sweet and lovable characters, Diana’s siblings Lily and Monty. Lily is herself a former star, although the occasional bit part and her constant tippling allow her to deny the “former” qualifier. Monty was a child star but left the business as his gayness emerged. He invested well and now busies himself with hustlers, whom he introduces to Lily as his acting students. Lily and Monty are like a cockeyed Norma Desmond and Max in a sunnier Sunset Boulevard. Lily even gets Philip to help on a screenplay she’s been writing for herself, as Norma does with her Salome. Lily’s is Amelia Flies Again!, in which the aviatrix not only survives her crash but manages to go on to kill Hitler. Keenan’s achievement here is that he avoids any sentimentality and adheres to the laws of farce. Lily and Monty aren’t actually good people; they just aren’t driven by the base motivations of the other characters, particularly Diana and Stephen. Lily isn’t afflicted by Diana’s steely career ambitions because, in her drunken delusions, she thinks she’s still at the top. Monty doesn’t suffer from Stephen’s concealed lust because he’s long surrendered his career and now contents himself with his hustlers. It’s true that Monty uses blackmail, as does just about everyone else in the novel, but he does it to help others rather than to advance himself. In this context, that qualifies him for sainthood. Monty sums up his morality when he defends one of his “students” to Philip: “He doesn’t steal and he looks like his ad. One can ask for no more.” The same can be said of Keenan’s book. It wants to make you laugh and it succeeds in doing it. One can ask for no more.
