ACTRESS is a successful shift of emphasis for this author who has written three previous Sam Dyke private eye crime fiction novels. It’s a penetrating look mostly at the business and promotional end of acting, on the stage as well as in film and television, and the stress it places on psyches and relationships.
20 year old Mai Rose is the focal point; she has had an good role in a tv series, “Amberside Terrace” but feels she is stagnating. As the novel opens, she is rehearsing the role of the young actress, Nina, in Chekhov’s THE SEA GULL. She has already appeared in one film and has another movie opportunity, this time to play the role of Deannah in a film to be based on a best seller. It is a choice part and will make her enormously wealthy, but the selection process is unusual. As part of a media promotion, five leading actresses, all of them young and highly visible stars, are being voted on by the public. The one who receives the most votes will get the leading role.
What the novel is particularly good at is examining the things that appeal to celebrities , “the money, the media appearances, the famous friends, the film premiers . . .” Mai is an intelligent young woman who almost accidentally fell into this world – she was attractive and her acting talent was recognized at age 17 in a national student drama festival. An agent represented her and she’d be the first to admit that she was lucky.
But the money, the media, the friends, and the gala premiers take a heavy toll. A small but telling detail is that she buys two expensive dogs but then finds she has no time for them, so hires a dog-walker who begins to do housekeeping and cooking for her. Mai treats her as she does her dogs - a few pats on the head and shallow perfunctory politeness, all lubricated by money.
Another minor episode in the novel adds depth to this impression. Mai goes to a light-show dance in an converted warehouse and becomes disoriented by the crowd, “a multi-limbed monster, a writhing, groaning behemoth which thrust hands and arms upwards into the light.” This is the public from a star’s perspective, and when Mai does focus on individuals, she sees only bodies wearing day-glo T-shirts or neon makeup. In this kind of business, a person becomes the mask he has assumed.
And Mai has no privacy. One evening she has had too much drink and throws up in public. A young fan is there to record all with her i phone camera. Mai’s companion is there to offer money for the footage, but it’s worth much more by posting it on you-tube. Ironically, instead of being a public-relations disaster, it seems to help her image with the public, as if young women were perversely identifying with her.
Mai is an always interesting and surprising character as she fights against being stereotyped, one of the strengths of the novel. Although she is sometimes confused (as who wouldn’t be?) and has her blind spots, she sees through enough of the hypocrisy and foolishness around to often speak honestly and openly, and ironically, as with the vomiting scene, it adds to her public appeal.
The book moves toward a suspenseful conclusion with the five candidates appearing in a tv special,the one garnering the most votes declared the winner. But to get to this point, Mai has had to navigate her way through a maze of drugs, alcohol, a suicide of a boyfriend,, an unstable Afghan vet brother, and a personally vindictive Helena Cross, her chief rival in the competition.
The novel ends ambiguously with Mai possibly turning in yet another direction. The one constant in Mai’s life has been a restlessness and a growing awareness of the banality of fame. But banal or not, fame includes power and money, and the central struggle of the novel, I think, is how to turn away from them or to try to use them responsibly. Mai has her “serious art”, of course, the Chekhov play, that counterpoints her pop culture star image, but that may not enough to satisfy her. Nothing comes easily in this satisfying novel.