Carey Harrison Richard’s Feet has recently been accoladed with the Encore Award, for the best second novel. He is, as he explains here, a celebrity’s child, being the son of Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer.
In Michael Korda’s Curtain a thinly disguised Laurence Olivier puts at risk his marriage to a thinly disguised Vivien Leigh by having an affair with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a no less thinly disguised Danny Kaye. Well!
Famous faces. Anyone at home behind them? Let’s begin with Brando, now a famously corpulent body beneath the spoiltangel head. The magnificently instinctual film performer belongs to a past when the man felt able to take acting seriously. By Last Tango in Paris, brooding power had turned to blubbery narcissism, and self-parody, it seemed, had come to stay. More recently, though having agreed to do a pastiche of his Godfather performance for The Freshman, a negligible vehicle, he responded with a largely unlooked-for sophistication – charming, precise, delieiously funny. No more than a witty footnote to his career, perhaps, but one that warns us not to patronise him. Contempt for Hollywood, exile to the South Seas, espousal of the Native American cause, have meanwhile directed attention towards the existence of another Brando.’
The traditional self-contained, sensibly-proportioned novel, still very much the dominant influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey...
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