The Real and Reel Worlds of a Hollywood Script Doctor

The shattering of Europe’s 19th century solidity gave us Austrian Robert Musil’s man without qualities. The condition of the urban black in mid-20th century America gave us Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. The contemporary culture of image and its manipulations gives us Steve Tesich’s man without a self.

Saul Karoo is middle-aged, overweight and silted up. He is prosperous and highly successful at his work, but it is like the success of the cancer cell: It is destroying the host organism. He is a movie doctor; his skill is to alter a script or unfinished film to make it work. Workability--or rather the image of workability in Hollywood’s mind--substitutes for whatever real vision, art or simple craftsmanship the original may have aimed at.

The plot of “Karoo” centers on Karoo’s destructive reediting of the final masterpiece of a once-eminent filmmaker, but its theme is self-destruction. Tesich, a well-known playwright and screenwriter who died in 1996 not long after finishing this novel, has attempted a satiric indictment of the culture he lived and worked in.

Karoo is the narrator of his own long dissolution. Part jeremiad, part shtick, witty at times and monstrously swollen at others, his story is an uncontainable implosion. All that he relates--his broken marriage, his relations with an adopted son, his work, his love for a minor actress whose career he advances, his dealings with the amoral and powerful producer who employs him--revolves insistently around his own hollowness; his lack not just of authenticity but of literal reality.

Image has replaced identity, he tells us and tells us again and again. He drinks heavily to sustain his reputation as an alcoholic old pro (but brilliant) and dutifully pretends to get drunk although alcohol does not affect him.

So little convinced is he of his own reality, in fact, that he lets his medical insurance lapse. Bullied to renew it, he fills out his medical history with lies. When the nurse tries to enter his weight and height, he storms off, unable to accept that he is 40 pounds heavier than the image he has of himself, and an inch and a half shorter.

His marriage founders because when he was alone with his wife he felt that he did not exist; it was only in the company of others that they got along. Naturally, once separated they get along fine, meeting to discuss the separation in a series of cozy dinners. If Karoo misses being married at all, in fact, it is because when he goes to his office he no longer has the satisfaction of getting away from his wife.

When Billy, his adopted son, tries for closeness, Karoo adopts grotesque measures to avoid being alone with him. He puts off telephoning his widowed mother because he “didn’t know who would be calling her.”

He is entirely lucid about how injurious all this is. On the face of it, the lucidity seems apologetic and confessional. In fact, with its combination of wit and self-abasement, it is arrogant in the way that Woody Allen, at his worst, can be. Cringing, it tugs us by the comic short hairs and pulls us down as well.

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There are some wickedly shrewd touches. Tesich’s portrait of Cromwell, the soulless film titan, is a cartoon but brilliantly suggestive. Karoo hates him but is unable to withstand him. The man has a terrifying forehead, he tells us; it is like “confronting a warhead with human features.” Cromwell’s seductiveness is even more terrifying. Warmly confiding as he hires Karoo to desecrate the old director’s masterpiece, “he was not merely saying the words but making sure that each of them entered my ear without spilling.”

Four hundred pages of characters who are no more than walking fever charts of contemporary symptoms--however well-recorded--would be excessive. In fact, it is only 200 pages or so, with considerable padding. The 200 pages that follow are something quite different, and worse.

Karoo is transformed. He falls in love with a bit-part actress, advances her career and reconciles with his son. Tesich has had him script-doctor himself into reality and human commitment; before long the script gives out and collapses in garish melodrama. Further rewriting ensues, producing an epic, this time, with the protagonist as a space-age Ulysses sailing off to find God.

Tesich has attempted to continue his satire by other means, spinning Karoo’s life into a wild assortment of genres. It does not work; the author loses control, and his novel churns its way into a narrative morass.