Talk about rerouting: readers who enjoy novels that start in one place and venture into unpredictable directions will admire Lucky Dogs, a novel by Helen Schulman (Come with Me; This Beautiful Life). Meredith Montgomery is a 24-year-old actress who refers to herself as one of the "lucky dogs"--someone from an underprivileged childhood who moved to L.A., "started dating high rollers," and became a star. At the novel's outset, however, she's hiding in a cheap Paris Airbnb, subsisting on ice cream, and working on a memoir about a man she calls the Rug, a powerful producer, "with that fake black toupee like a furry Frisbee on his egg-shaped pate." He's based on Harvey Weinstein, and--as Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan did--Meredith has taken to Twitter to publicize that he assaulted her.
While in Paris, she meets a woman who calls herself Nina and claims to belong to an organization called W2, a women's rights group. Readers will think they know where this is going, but Schulman has a surprise: Nina is not the person she claims to be. Schulman divides her tale between Meredith's and Nina's stories, slowly revealing the connections between them. The two stories don't mesh as neatly as they could have, but Schulman has a knack for writing indelible and affecting scenes. And she presents a nice contrast between the lives of privileged Hollywood types and those whose circumstances are substantially more challenging. Lucky Dogs howls with rage but doesn't offer easy answers. Talk about impressive. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer