Starlite Terrace is a spare, sensitive quartet of Patrick Roth stories narrated by a German expatriate living in a rundown Los Angeles apartment complex whose bickering residents gather at weather-beaten Noah's Deli on Ventura Boulevard. It's a lean, swift, and tangled skein of tales-within-tales strung on a circuitous narrative line, interlaced with dreams and memories, in a literary approximation of the way we really perceive life.
In "The Man at Noah's Window," Rex remembers a day 35 years ago when he realized his mother was a hooker, discovers that he was named after a movie theater and quarrels with Pete, a nosy neighbor who doubts that Rex's father was really hired for close-ups in 1950s westerns--specifically, to replace Gary Cooper's hands in High Noon.
"Solar Eclipse" centers on Moss McCloud, a former Broadway casting agent who carries around the manuscript of his autobiography, written to justify himself to his daughter. His wife has kidnapped the child and turned her against him, leading Moss to consider taking out a contract on his wife's life. The third story, "Rider on the Storm," focuses on Gary, a new Starlite resident. When his car is immobilized over unpaid parking tickets, Gary persuades the narrator to give him a ride so he can borrow some money; their trip unexpectedly erupts into violence.
Finally, "The Woman in the Sea of Stars," the Starlite's manager, June, a former executive secretary at Fox, is visited on the day before her 77th birthday by a recently divorced niece. June remembers her own husband, whose numerous infidelities included Marilyn Monroe, then segues to tales of Bugsy Siegel and the atom bomb tests in Nevada that contaminated the sands where John Wayne shot the movie that killed him with cancer.
Roth defines his characters entirely by how they tell their stories, without a flicker of physical description. His aging characters are all very aware of mortality, as the tales of the last days of Gary Cooper and John Wayne ripple through their own. Their stories are confessions and excuses told by morally compromised people tangled up in their own failures and self-deceptions. Roth respects his time-battered losers, though, and offers the Hollywood mythos back to us with an authentic fascination and a perception all his own. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: Four tales of Hollywood told by a German narrator staying in a rundown L.A. apartment complex where the elderly residents bend his ear with their dying stories.