Karoo
Steve Tesich
Vintage pbk, 406 pgs, £6.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Saul Karoo is a Doc. On the opposite coast that's a hack and an end to it. But this is New York and the Atlantic coast makes you a Doc. Fat, middle-aged and shrinking (a proud six-footer, time and gravity are hard task masters), he fixes scripts to order. Or, assuming studios have recklessly gone ahead and spent without asking, they hand over a badly-cut cassette and expect a wave of his wand: cut the fat, add the gags. Saul Karoo is good at his job.
Not so a marriage ("a fake orgasm in public") which is undergoing the rigours of divorce. Or relations with their beautiful, beloved adopted son Billy. "There is mounting evidence that my personal life is now composed almost exclusively of those very fat, unnecessary scenes," he concludes.
Then one day the manila envelope contains a cut of Arthur Houseman's final film. The Arthur Houseman. The Old Man. Known and respected around Hollywood. Except now Houseman is dying and über-producer Jay Cromwell is convinced the grand Old Man of American cinema has fucked-up.
This is a book about art and compromise. Saul Karoo is not a bad man per se, but he is a man prepared to do bad things. He drinks like a fish, but that's only experimentation: he's just realised he's incapable of getting drunk. He feigns what's expected of him: he tells us as he sees it. It's a book about a man defining the world in his own image. Houseman's film offers him a way to finish the project - except, he's already flagged the Old Man's final work for a small masterpiece. And how right is right when it means sucking-up to the manipulative Cromwell and massacring Houseman's genius to his own nefarious ends?
Steve Tesich won the screenplay Oscar in 1979 for that charming coming of age flick Breaking Away, so at least the various Hollywood machinations he lays bare ring with authenticity. Which is just as well, because the opening quarter - character stuff, before plot kicks in: stuff Saul Karoo would sacrifice - does rather amble, albeit in some rather shapely prose. Once it's up and running, however, Karoo comes on like the bastard son of Michael Tolkin, with that La-La Land autopsy The Player an obvious touchstone. The results of Karoo's meddling however (Tesich turns this novel on sixpence more than once and it would be unfair to say too much) owe far more to the pathos of Tolkin's far blacker, way-of-American-death follow-up, Among The Dead.
The end itself is a long time coming and, in shooting for profundity, almost overbalances the whole: even Saul Karoo would find it hard to smuggle that onto film. Sadly though it's not a problem Tesich can fix in the mix - he died, aged just 53, in 1996, shortly after completing this book. It's an impressive testament.