Pandaemonium: A Novel

by Leslie Epstein

A collection of moguls, agents, directors, starlets, writers, gossip columnists, and a great film director named Rudolf Von Beckmann, all of whom converge on a small town to make a film

Genres: Fiction

398 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 1998

About the author

Leslie Donald Epstein was an American educator, essayist, and novelist.

Reviews

[Hallie Cantor · Rating 1 out of 5]

The novel seems to be a fictionalized account of the German (or German-speaking) Jews in Hollywood, among them the author's father and uncle. It begins in Salzburg, Austria, with a director Von Beckman trying to stage the play Antigone right during the Anschluss and a visit from Nazi dignitaries, among them Hitler himself. Narrated by actor Peter Lorre, who is trying to get out of his Mr. Moto films, the action takes the reader through escapades of various second-rate actors and producers of a B-movie in the Nevada desert. The movie, titled Pandemonium, highlights the backbiting and sexual shenanigans (a bit too explicitly) of those involved.

Frankly, I found the book a convoluted, pointless mess, which I barely managed to slough through. It starts out well, as the movie crew suspensefully attempts to flee the newly invaded Austria, but then it slides into rambling prose that strains credulity. The author may have taken too much liberty with Lorre and famed publicist Louella Parsons. Perhaps the message was the utter frivolity of Hollywood, and the blindness of its large Jewish constituency to the horrors in Eastern Europe, until America's entry into World War Two sobered everyone up and jolted the studios into seriousness. (It ends with Lorre on the set in Casablanca, one of my favorite classic films, conversing with Jack Warner, who has been made an honorary colonel.)

I don't know how much of Peter Lorre's life was factual here, other than the externals. Was he, himself an Austro-Hungarian Jew, truly aware before everyone else of the atrocities in Poland? This book seems intentionally absurd, with art imitating life, to the oblivion of brutal reality outside the studios. This novel contains some of the irony of Epstein's earlier King of the Jews, which paralleled Shakespeare's MacBeth with a megalomaniac Judenrat leader (possibly modeled after Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who ran Lodz Ghetto). I enjoyed that book. Alas, not this one. Perhaps the director's obsessive production of Antigone was meant to represent the inherent Greek tragedy of the characters who comprised Hollywood's elite and hopefuls. Sadly, none of them were likeable or interesting.

[Brady Westwater · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of the very few books I found to be totally unreadable. The prose style is so leaden, despite numerous efforts, I have never been able to read more than a few pages of the first chapter.

And every time I attempted to find readable pages elsewhere in the book, I failed to find a single paragraph which made me want to read the next sentence.

And what puzzles me is that the subject matter is a perfect fit for me, we each share a love of Proust and I admire the writings of his father and his uncle.

But every paragraph of this novel, is more unreadable than any book I can ever recall reading. And that makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel opens well, and the section set in Salzburg could stand alone as an excellent novella. The rest of the book is needlessly protracted and lacks the coherence and the tension of that first part. Despite the immense amount of time lavished upon it, the Pandaemonium/Third Reich parallel is never developed beyond a superficial level; instead, it's a convenient device upon which the author hangs a lot of colourful action. On the whole, the book is generally quite enjoyable, without being any sort of literary masterpiece.