When good actors write bad books
Fame in one artistic realm yields negative dividends in another
There’s no reason to pretend otherwise: Tom Hanks’s debut novel, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” was not published because anybody thought it was good. Maybe some people do think it’s good, but it was published because it was written by Tom Hanks. The same is true of other actors who have written novels, like Sidney Poitier, Molly Ringwald, and Sean Penn.
This is unfair, but it is not uniquely unfair. Books are often published for reasons other than their quality: Most books aren’t good. What is unique about this collection of books is the feeling, pervasive through all, that nobody in particular tried to make them better. As Ernest Hemingway said, the only kind of writing is rewriting, whether on one’s own or with the help of peers, agents, editors.
Actors, whose profession is built on collaboration, should be primed for this better than the general population. Perhaps that process did occur and just failed? Regardless, these novels as we have them are universally overstuffed: too many plot lines with too many characters having too many revelations rendered in too many paragraphs filled with too many sentences made up of too many words. They are admirably ambitious, but none are executed with the attention and rigor required to make them successful.
Take “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” which is mostly an account — written by a journalist named Shaw — of the making of a production by a famed director. It’s a cool idea: Making-of books are often illuminating and juicy. The constructs and cliches are ripe for satire. And Hanks, over his decades-long career, surely has a better sense than most about what actually happens on a movie set.
Unfortunately, it’s not convincing for even a second. Hanks writes with no regard for what a journalist might plausibly know or how a journalist might plausibly convey information. Stylistically a straightforward third-person omniscient novel (save for dozens and dozens of dreadfully boring footnotes), it’s mostly an ode to how competent and hard-working everyone in “the business of show” is. Personal assistants, producers, teamsters, actors, directors, writers, the hair and makeup teams, the location scouts, and more all get their due. It is a nice thing for Hanks to do but better material for an acceptance speech than a novel.
But these are claustrophobic books, every millimeter of ambiguity vacuumed out. Poitier’s novel, “Montaro Caine,” is undone by an inability to leave anything in his mystery mysterious. For portions, as his titular character, a CEO of a mining company, tries to manage a hostile takeover attempt while tracking a strange coin made of otherworldly material and its owners across the world, there’s a propulsive tension. But every question ends up with the cleanest possible answer. There’s no real misdirection or surprise. As the book winds to a close, he takes a page for a character to simply list the takeaways: “The longer you do not act, the weaker the better self in each of you becomes, and the harder your struggle against the relentless pulls of greed, selfishness, and the addictive lust for power … science and education are the seeds that will blossom into the answers you seek.”
Ringwald is the best writer of the bunch but the same unwillingness to let readers think for themselves hampers her work. The novel-in-stories “When it Happens to You” revolves around divorced parents, Greta and Phillip, and their daughter, Charlotte, focusing on the ripples caused by the separation. She, at least, is more interested in her characters as characters than she is in making some banal point. But the smaller infringements still ultimately overwhelm. In the story “The Little One,” a widow, Betty, estranged from her adult daughter, Mandy, begins an odd relationship with Charlotte, largely unsupervised by her now-single mother. After getting angry at Charlotte’s misbehavior, the widow passes out and is taken to the hospital. Though they haven’t talked in years, Mandy is there when Betty wakes up, though Betty doesn’t understand how. ‘I rented my old apartment to a … friend, and she called me.’ Betty noticed the way her daughter hesitated when she said the word ‘friend,’ understanding that she was more than a friend.” Over-explanations like this abound, and working through how her characters process obvious information is a frequent Ringwald stand-in for them actually doing something, which happens rarely.
Sean Penn’s “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff ” is so mind-numbing it almost escapes this same error. Penn unwittingly provides readers with an apt description of the ordeal of plugging through his novel: “In the battle within Bob’s brain, media sources created a chaos overload. A marketed, manipulated assault on retention.” Though it’s about an assassin who travels the world killing the elderly, “Bob Honey” somehow manages to be both dull and overly didactic. At one point, as he’s traveling, Bob “realizes that not only in road-roaming reality has romance been relinquished to ruin, but the cinemas themselves have been caged and quartered into quixotic concrete calamities of corporatized culture capitulation.”
Not all actors are doomed to write this way, obviously. Carrie Fisher’s novel, “Postcards from the Edge,” for example, is impressive — a funny, moving book about celebrity and addiction. Probably the same percentage of actors are good novelists as in the general population, but their bad books are a lot more likely to be published. Reading these, it’s hard to say whether that’s a positive or negative consequence of fame.