What do you think?
Rate this book
Final Performance
A story of Hollywood, celebrity and the love of two brothers. It conveys a family's predicament: the decline of one brother, their mother's disappearance and reappearance and the flayed emotions in search of healing, the loneliness and intimacy of despair and the buoyancy of filial love.
335 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1988
20 people want to read
About the author
James Brown
671 books120 followersJames Brown is the author of several novels, and the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries, This River, and Apology to the Young Addict (to-be-published March 2020). He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing and the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The New England Review.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 16, 2017
The San Jose Diaries:
This wasn't an easy book to read, and it won't be easy to review. But then again, I hazard it wasn't easy to write.
"Final Performance" is about two boys named Jay and Mike growing up in San Jose, California during the late 1960s and early 70s. Their mother is a serial arsonist with mental and legal problems, while their father is a good-hearted, but worn-out construction worker who only wants things to pan out for his rapidly disintegrating family.
The parents eventually separate and the boys move with their unbalanced mother to Los Angeles. In L.A. Mike becomes a professional actor under contract to Paramount, and Jay becomes a petty thief, burglar, and serial truant from the local school where he is failing.
Eventually Mike commits suicide.
Revealing this isn't really a spoiler, since the novel is framed by the ghost of Mike appearing to his younger brother Jay at the beginning and end of the book, taunting his younger brother with little details about why he took his life (and also providing inspiration and material for his younger brother to become a professional writer). The book is part memoir, part investigative reconstruction, as Brown's surrogate Jay struggles to understand his own brother's struggles to make it in Hollywood while wrestling with his sizable coterie of demons.
This story should already be familiar to anyone who read Brown's twin memoirs of addiction, "The Los Angeles Diaries" and "This River." But this book is no retread of those works, and can be read either as a standalone or as a deeper companion piece to the aforementioned short masterworks.
"Final Performance" was written more than a decade before Brown's breakthrough with "The Los Angeles Diaries," and while he obviously grew as a writer in the interim between visits to this very strong material, it's evident even from this earlier foray that he is already in command of his subject, and is a born writer. It's just a tragedy that his talent was forged in such a harsh crucible. Recommended.
This wasn't an easy book to read, and it won't be easy to review. But then again, I hazard it wasn't easy to write.
"Final Performance" is about two boys named Jay and Mike growing up in San Jose, California during the late 1960s and early 70s. Their mother is a serial arsonist with mental and legal problems, while their father is a good-hearted, but worn-out construction worker who only wants things to pan out for his rapidly disintegrating family.
The parents eventually separate and the boys move with their unbalanced mother to Los Angeles. In L.A. Mike becomes a professional actor under contract to Paramount, and Jay becomes a petty thief, burglar, and serial truant from the local school where he is failing.
Eventually Mike commits suicide.
Revealing this isn't really a spoiler, since the novel is framed by the ghost of Mike appearing to his younger brother Jay at the beginning and end of the book, taunting his younger brother with little details about why he took his life (and also providing inspiration and material for his younger brother to become a professional writer). The book is part memoir, part investigative reconstruction, as Brown's surrogate Jay struggles to understand his own brother's struggles to make it in Hollywood while wrestling with his sizable coterie of demons.
This story should already be familiar to anyone who read Brown's twin memoirs of addiction, "The Los Angeles Diaries" and "This River." But this book is no retread of those works, and can be read either as a standalone or as a deeper companion piece to the aforementioned short masterworks.
"Final Performance" was written more than a decade before Brown's breakthrough with "The Los Angeles Diaries," and while he obviously grew as a writer in the interim between visits to this very strong material, it's evident even from this earlier foray that he is already in command of his subject, and is a born writer. It's just a tragedy that his talent was forged in such a harsh crucible. Recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review