A STAR IS BORED
By Byron Lane
In the epigraph to “A Star Is Bored,” Byron Lane’s wildly funny and irreverent debut novel, the author embellishes a boilerplate disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. … Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental, including names, places, weapons and sexual acts.” Lane was a personal assistant to the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, and her fictional doppelgänger in this novel is 56-year-old Kathi Kannon, who starred as Priestess Talara in the film “Nova Quest.” Kathi is mystifying, maddening and captivating, and her relationship with Charlie Besson, her 29-year-old assistant, is essentially a love story — except instead of the traditional Hollywood romance, it features two largehearted, misfit souls forming an unusual friendship.
When we meet Charlie, his “life feels like rot.” He loathes his job as a graveyard-shift writer for a TV news station, and he struggles with what his therapist labels “passive suicidal behavior” — self-destructive drinking, marijuana use and unsafe sex. He’s never been in a serious relationship, and he continues to mourn his mother, who died suddenly when he was 12. His hopes for his future rise when an acquaintance arranges the interview with Kathi, “heroine of film, television, maybe my life.”
When Charlie was a boy, his mother gave him a beloved Priestess Talara action figure, which his abusive, homophobic father took away. “He thought female action figures were the reason I ‘ran like a girl,’” Charlie says. His father terrorized him for being gay, and his father’s “masculine voice is still screaming at me, in my head … even while here, auditioning for a new role in Hollywood’s royal court.”
Their meeting calls to mind falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Nearly every sentence Kathi utters is darkly comic, even when she tries to remember Charlie’s name. He reminds her it starts with a “C,” and so she guesses — and lands on a lewd word for a type of penile jewelry that can’t be printed here. This becomes his sobriquet. (By the way, if penis jokes don’t make you crack a tiny smile, then it’s likely this novel isn’t for you.)
Kathi’s estate is a character in itself: “It looks like a carnival. It looks like an acid trip. It looks like heaven.” Her yard is filled with painted tree trunks, smutty mannequins and dollhouses with lights on “for what could very well be lucky, magical, tiny people who get to live there.” The inside of her home is a riot of color and eccentric décor, including a moose head who “once saw Jack Nicholson nude.” Celebrity names are sprinkled through the novel, from Kathi impersonating Marcia Gay Harden to asking Bradley Cooper, “What’s a guy like you doing in a gal like me?”
As Kathi’s assistant, Charlie administers a daily allotment of pills to treat her bipolar disorder, along with Coke Zero and Weight Busters cereal, yet he’s baffled by what his other responsibilities are until he meets another Hollywood assistant, who explains, “These jobs are about being … being there for them.” Charlie writes his own Assistant Bible and learns to be present for Kathi in every way, answering her texts at all hours, including such questions as, “Why do I take the pink pill the shape of a testicle?” When Kathi has a manic episode, Charlie stops her from walking into traffic.
Kathi becomes a mother figure to Charlie — shopping for him, offering guidance, causing him to feel that “someone, finally, sees me, or at least sees my potential.” When they check into a motel, she introduces Charlie to a clerk as her stepson.
The boredom mentioned in the title is not only weariness, but a yearning to be distracted from the pain of life. Kathi asks, “What is the meaning of it all?” Charlie isn’t sure. His therapist tells him, “It’s a friendly universe” — though his traumatic upbringing and Kathi’s struggles seem to indicate otherwise.
Lane’s sentences are sometimes overdone: “I have to let Mom go and orient to a new North Star. I have to look forward. I have to believe Mom would want it that way. I have to look to Kathi Kannon.” He’s at his best when he allows his quirky characters to take over, especially when he describes Kathi and Charlie’s extensive travels.
They transport their Wonderland with them, transforming hotel rooms with Christmas lights, glitter and colorful scarves. Their most affecting trip is an impromptu expedition to Yellowknife, Canada, to see the northern lights. Kathi has long used the alias “Aurora Borealis” at hotels; when the pair finally witness the phenomenon, they hold hands. Lane writes: “Those dreaded screen savers will have you believe the lights are always crystal clear and sharp, making a smooth zigzag across the sky in green and yellow and blue and purple. But in real life, it’s different. It’s a little more like a haze or a fog.” Kathi admits to Charlie, “I want to be this forever.”
In her novel “Postcards From the Edge,” Carrie Fisher wrote, “You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood because everybody does the fake closeness so well.” Yet here it is on the page: Charlie’s foggy friendship with Kathi defies convention, and Lane’s writing lifts the novel far above its gossamer Hollywood setting, suffusing his portrait of Kathi with a complex sensitivity. In a hotel room in Japan, Kathi reaches out to him: “Her grip tightens and mine does, too, me clinging to my star, on our cloud of hotel bedding.” Bound by their sadness, Kathi and Charlie navigate the world.
At the end of the novel, I felt a deep sense of grief for Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016. This story made me long for a universe in which Charlie and Kathi could be action figures themselves: icons whose sensitivity is a superpower that can save us.
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