Review: Temptation

As Douglas Kennedy's Temptation opens, David Armitage has been trying for years to break into the screenwriting game with no success. (In a nice touch, he's making his share of the family income by working at the West Hollywood indie Book Soup.) Then his agent calls to let him know a production company has bought his latest pilot script; before too long, it's picked up as a series and David is hired on as the executive story supervisor.

Kennedy fast-forwards through the obvious parts of David's meteoric rise, where he abandons the marriage that had been strained by his previous failures and takes up with a hot, young network executive, then slows the story down again as David receives an invitation from a reclusive billionaire to take a meeting at one of his island homes. Philip Fleck may have made his fortune in investing, but he's always wanted to make movies--in fact, he's notorious for writing and directing a godawful self-produced movie. Now he's got one of David's earliest scripts, and he's interested in filming it... if he can turn it into a 21st-century version of Pasolini's notoriously, deliberately obscene Salo.

At first glance, Temptation looks like a smart, snappy update of the Jackie Collins/Jacqueline Susann novel, with sleazy brokers who can quote Adam Smith by memory and illicit romances sparked by quotations from T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson. Poke at the glitzy surface details, though, and you'll begin to see a lean, mean noir thriller, as a gossip columnist's accusation of plagiarism snowballs into David losing his job, his girlfriend and even his Emmy. (Here, too, Kennedy strikes the erudite note, as one of David's unproduced plays is an updating of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata.") It doesn't take too long to figure out that Fleck, with his obsessive interest in how human beings exert control and dominance over each other, is behind the systematic dismantling of David's life; motive doesn't even particularly figure into it, as a guy with $20 billion doesn't need reasons. The question is, how will David be able to push back against such a crushing force?

In some ways, including the first-person narration, David's existential crisis and the path he finds out of it echo Kennedy's debut novel, The Big Picture (1996). As Kennedy continues to tackle the theme of upended lives, Temptation demonstrates a literary confidence that lifts his stories above much of the competition. --Ron Hogan

Shelf Talker: Atria's reintroduction of Kennedy to American audiences continues with the release of this fast-paced, quirky psychological thriller from 2006.

 

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