You Don’t Die of Love
By Thomas Thonson
Copyright © 2011
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1460928745
254 pages
$14.95 at Amazon.com
Writing from personal experience can be a great tonic to exorcise one’s demons while remaining authoritative at the same time. It can also result in a self-serving rant. Thomas Thonson is a veteran of the Hollywood film industry and the theme of his unpretentious collection, You Don’t Die of Love, is Hollywood and people whose lives it impacts.
Fortunately, these stories appear to have been slow-cooked over time to remove any acrimony (not to mention predictable Tinseltown clichés) while staying authentic. This is helped by a detached yet warm tone, giving the writing an agreeable melancholy. Periodic passages of movie speak succeed and are not gimmicky because they fit, artistically. I particularly liked this one from the opening to the third story, Caper:
By all accounts Gary Grand had been naked when he ran across the Hollywood freeway in the dwindling dusk of that Friday rush hour. Various witnesses had given their accounts. The newsmen from all the local channels had gotten them all on tape beneath a circling helicopter, the chug-chug of the blades stirring the air, their hair lifting delicately from the heads, staring blankly into the camera’s blinding light, as they breathlessly recounted their stories: “I looked up and there he was . . .”
A sequence emerged: a shifting shape, stutter-stepping, blurry, pixilated by the stabbing headlights, a comic sequence, silent movie speed, Keystone Cop funny . . . pale figure, arms flailing, a slab of white paper in his hands . . . defying all odds as he slashed across the lanes in a zigzag run.
That the stories vary widely in length and narrative style does not affect the unity of the collection. The interrelation of dissolute characters, along with the filmic context, reminds me of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The book opens with Western, which takes place after the death of Harry Dare an old time actor of Westerns whose private life was more dramatic than his cinematic one. While not an active character, his ghost lingers and affects family, friends, lovers, acquaintances, and colleagues. The themes of love and death, as implied by the title, echo throughout.
I saw Harry’s corporeal death as symbolizing the death of Hollywood, or rather an anachronistic version of the Hollywood in which the big studios ruled. Harry Dare; Hollywood: there is a phonetic similarity. There is also a parallel between Harry’s posthumous influence and that of the old ways of Hollywood upon the characters. To me, Hollywood is not as much the subject of You Don’t Die of Love, as it is the blood of its content.
The title and final story is the most in-depth and arguably strongest piece, even though it seems to lack a central character. It does have one in Dare’s daughter Nora, who struggles to reconcile her outwardly glamorous person with her inner and duller (yet more fascinating) anal-retentive self. Unfortunately, the impact of her story is diluted by getting into the heads of lesser characters, particularly Victor. Nonetheless, it’s a satisfying way to tie it all together.
My only regret is that the book needed one more rigorous round of copyediting and proofreading. The former to prune some excessive narration, such as authorial intrusions and superfluous background biographical information; the latter to fix basic technical errors. These stories deserve as much, particularly the last one.
That doesn’t prevent me from wholeheartedly recommending You Don’t Die of Love.
