“I am a sellout. I have been for a long, long time. Longer than some of you have been alive. I decided that I wanted to have fun and make some money for my wife and me to go to nice restaurants in nice clothes, and I became a sellout.” This is Verity, one of three narrators in Lauren Rothery’s debut novel, “Television.” He is an extraordinarily handsome movie star with an alcohol problem who has made so much money from a blockbuster film franchise in which he plays an “intergalactic thief with a heart of palladium” that when the fifth installment is announced, he decides to give away his entire gazillion-dollar payment and his percentage of the profit via a lottery among people who see the movie and send in their ticket. This tactic drives the film to enormous box office success.
The second narrator is Helen, a screenwriter and longtime friend of Verity’s, as well as his sometime lover, perhaps the wife he refers to in the quote above (a wedding is discussed but never seen). They met when Verity was still a struggling newcomer and he slept on her couch, but have since been photographed together on the red carpet, and the change in Verity’s fortune is such that, when Helen has trouble making rent, he solves the problem by buying her apartment building. The scene of their meeting two decades earlier, in a diner called Eileen’s that has since closed, is one of several that is dramatized in back-and-forth sections, each taking up where the other left off.
The third narrator, appearing partway through the book, is Phoebe, a young woman who is in France staying in her grandparents’ house after their deaths. She is attempting to write a screenplay about a pair of characters who meet in a coffee shop — chunks of it, as well as a short story she’s written, are included — but her connection to Verity and Helen is not clear until the end of the book. This bit of narrative tension was the main reason I stuck with the novel, as I was unable to care for the characters. The chronology was sometimes confusing and the stylish approach eventually felt digressive and meandering.
As I thought about why the book was called “Television” when it is actually about the big screen industry, I reread this typical stream-of-consciousness monologue from Verity:
“Some people you meet them and you imagine this movie together. The two of you make a kind of movie and then it’s over. Other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television. Maybe that won’t make sense to you if you’re twenty and used to watching about three hundred things at one time, but television was when you wanted to tune in every Monday at eight o’clock, week after week, for years. Even after the whole series ended, you’d tune in for the reruns. It wasn’t about the plot, you just weren’t tired of them yet. It didn’t need to be sexy. It was romantic. If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.”
Certainly this is what Rothery hoped for with this novel — that you would be so interested in the characters that you wouldn’t mind the low-energy plot. There also seems to be some kind of generational commentary going on — for example, in Helen and Verity’s sections, cellphones are usually referred to as “rectangles,” and not in quotation marks. But in Phoebe’s screenplay about a much younger pair of friends, phones appear as themselves.
Rothery’s themes of wealth, power, friendship, and the soulessness of the entertainment industry — the publisher describes it as “Bojack Horseman meets Joan Didion” which really does sound great — are surely of interest to many readers. But some may find its indirect, subtle, even sly approach to its subject gets in the way.
TELEVISION
By Lauren Rothery
Ecco, 256 pages, $28
Marion Winik is the author of “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead,” and the host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader.”