In his second novel, Arts & Entertainments, Christopher Beha (What Happened to Sophie Wilder) shifts his setting from the world of writers to that of unscripted reality television--two worlds that aren't really as different as they might seem. They're both about crafting stories; the players just use different tools to do it.
When he left St. Albert's School, "Handsome Eddie" Hartley thought that he and his girlfriend, Martha Martin, both had long careers of acting out other people's stories ahead of them, but he was wrong. Fifteen years later, Martha is a household name with a hit TV show, while Eddie is back at St. Albert's, half-heartedly teaching drama and struggling to start a family with his wife, Susan. This reluctant schoolteacher, who once made a sex tape with his now-famous ex-girlfriend, just might have a way to pay for his wife's infertility treatments.
When Eddie sells his old video of Martha to an Internet entrepreneur, he's not thinking about any anything but funding his and Susan's efforts to have a baby. He certainly never imagines that his wife's high-risk pregnancy will be played out on social media and reality TV, or that his role of a lifetime will be an edited-for-broadcast version of himself.
Beha's sharp observations on the intentionally crafted, carefully produced versions of private lives that become public property resonate in a time when it sometimes feels like a life unexamined by other people isn't a life properly lived. Arts & Entertainments is indeed entertaining, but it's also a thoughtful reflection on how we shape our own stories. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness