The Big Nickelodeon

New York: Random House. Very Good+. (c.1956). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a nice clean solid copy, light bumping to the lower corners and a touch of soiling to the bottom of the text block, but no other significant wear; vintage bookseller's label (Vroman's, Pasadena) on rear pastedown]. Something of an oddity, a putative "Hollywood novel" that isn't, really, at least not in the sense of having much to do directly with the movie industry. Bibliographer Anthony Slide describes it as dealing with "the sex lives of a group of Hollywood types," and I think the key word here is "types": there's an ex-screenwriter (emphasis on ex-), the daughter of a deceased movie pioneer, a young gay (and unsuccessful) actor, and so on, but the book's two most compelling characters are Maggie, a young divorced mother with no connection to the film biz, and Stush, a bisexual drifter who's just arrived in L.A. as the book opens and who insinuates himself into the lives (and beds) of several different people over the course of the book. Critic Robert Kirsch, writing in the Los Angeles Times, inexplicably called the novel "unquestionably the best in its field since Budd Schulberg's 'What Makes Sammy Run'," but another contemporary reviewer struck a more accurate note by dubbing it a novel of "the Hollywood periphery." And even Kirsch acknowledged that "the film industry never directly appears in the book. We are not given a guided tour of the movie studios, or of glittering previews, or of wild parties, or of endless story conferences. The Big Nickelodeon [the Hollywood film industry] remains in the background while the characters haunted by it act out their roles on muscle beach, or shacks at Malibu, or old houses at Venice, or Hollywood apartments, or parking lots, or San Fernando Valley tract homes." It seems clear enough to me, then, that the book is more in the lineage of Nathanael West ("The Day of the Locust") or Horace McCoy ("I Should Have Stayed Home") than Budd Schulberg. .