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The story’s both simple in outline and richly complex in the telling, something like life. As the ‘80s edge into the ‘90s, a New York writer, convinced he’s the one who could capture his generation “in acerbic, sharply-etched works that might stand as testaments to a time and place,” enters recklessly into a marriage that soon goes south. After a couple rough years, he ventures to Los Angeles for an escape from the fights … and a crack at true cultural prominence. There he faces depression, a $5,000-a-month sex and coke habit, and the end of his discipline and optimism.
True to his word, though, that narrator offers us a sharply etched testament to Los Angeles in the 1990s, from the perspective of Mailer-loving not-quite-genius who elects to “[murder] shame by embracing it.” Vividly detailed, shot through with heartache, and slicingly funny about the humiliations of life as a screenwriter—"I’d been subjected to the process of development, an ordeal that began with the assumption that what I’d written was a failure”— Permission will thrill lovers of old-school, id-driven literary novels.
Takeaway: An incisive, hilarious, sex-drenched novel of ‘90s Hollywood and a screenwriter’s addictions.
Great for fans of: Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A