The best comedy comes from double acts
There’s a great female buddy movie in Canadian journalist’s first work
Based on a True Story Elizabeth Renzetti (House of Anansi Press)
At the madly beating heart of Elizabeth Renzetti’s debut novel Based on a True Story is a great female buddy movie. This is the book’s greatest virtue, but also perhaps its greatest weakness. Much as we may enjoy funny books, we seldom take them seriously.
The epigraph to Renzetti’s book comes from one of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novels, and it’s a handy nod to literary precursors in the comedic vein. Other names you might find in this book’s family tree are Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster and Benson’s Mapp and Lucia. These progenitors serve as a useful reminder that the best comedy comes from double acts, and at the crux of the comedic duo is a contrast in characters. In Based on a True Story, aging British actress Augusta Price and young U.S. naïf tabloid reporter Frances Bleeker are a match made in sidekick heaven.
The novel opens with Augusta leaving rehab at the end of a long week that was meant to be two weeks. As she explains to her chum Alma, it was the sort of place where they used journey as a verb. Augusta has recently published her memoir: Based on a True Story: A Memoir of Sorts, which finds itself on the bestseller list nestled between “the confessions of a disgraced DJ and the autobiography of a badgers’ rights activist.”
Frances and Augusta meet just as Frances, about to lose her job, is Bridget-Jonesing after her boss, and Augusta is trying to work out how to produce her next book having already blown her advance. When Augusta is invited to participate in a fan conference in Los Angeles, she persuades Frances to accompany her. Frances needs a job and Augusta needs a ghostwriter; hijinks are bound to ensue.
Short chapters keep the episodic plot moving rapidly forward but the real joy of the story lies in the dialogue. A first meeting between ill-fated lovers Augusta and Kenneth Deller begins with a proffered handshake and the retort: “No, you can keep your hand. I’ve got two of my own, and I’m thinking of using one of them to give you a good slap.” The plot operates on the level of farce, with things going from bad to worse and worse still, as Frances and Augusta travel from London to California.
The scene where our young heroine inadvertently takes a massive dose of our not-so-young heroine’s anti-anxiety medication echoes the glorious scene from David Copperfield when young Copperfield finds himself drunk for the first time. From that first misstep, Frances finds herself on the slippery slope and she and Augusta proceed to stumble (sometimes literally) from one madcap mishap to another. While readers are invited to laugh at Augusta’s foibles, the novel does not fail to take measure of the consequences of her addic- tions, managing for the most part to strike a balance between comedy and pathos.
Renzetti is a Canadian journalist who spent years based in London and she has clearly picked up the lingo. The novel is packed with absolutely fabulous lines and is at its most appealing at its most aphoristic: Rehab: “What a loathsome word. It suggested new fabric on a knackered sofa.” California: “Everyone in London looked unkempt most of the time. Only here did she realize the word had an opposite.”
The very best jokes in the book, however, are the ones that are not quite funny, the ones that have a barb in them, or a faint taste of arsenic. There is a running gag where Augusta looks at her son Charlie and wonders who it is that he reminds her of. It may be a wise child that knows its own father, but in this case the wisdom doesn’t extend to the mother of that child.
Based on a True Story is a seriously funny book, and the world Renzetti portrays is one where a child could be called Hecubah, prostitutes in track suits ride mobility scooters and tattooed waiters expect to get their break selling a Tumblr composed of hilarious sex ads. It’s not giving too much away to note that the book ends, as it must, if not with all sorrows ended, then at least with a fumbling toward recovery.