A lively novel based on a real crime in midcentury Hollywood
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Post-tragedy Kup and his flamboyant wife, Essee, 'dropped' Lou and his spouse Babs, 'like a pair of old shoes.' The abrupt rift enthralls Jed Rosenthal, Lou and Babs's grandson, a writing professor at Loyola in Chicago. Jed was born seven years after Cookie's death, but he's obsessed with the Kupcinets; in 2019 he embarks on an 'autofiction,' sleuthing among the cold case. He's separated from his partner, Hanna, and co-parenting, sort of, their toddler Leah. Hanna has banished him to an austere apartment where he holes up with his cat, Rudy. She's moved on. 'Hanna used to say that I loved nothing more than to wallow,' Jed notes. 'I don't dispute this. I'm a champion wallower. But I do believe there's a difference between wallowing and trying to claw your way back in time.'
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Jed's quest to discover what happened to Cookie takes him from his office to the salons of East Lake Shore Drive to Tinseltown archives where Cookie's records are housed. Some pages are composed of a single paragraph, creating space for the author to stretch his narrative muscles. His voice is strong and clear, peppered with Jewish sarcasm; his dialogue is its own kibitz, digressions that reveal clues. Beneath his characters' banter lurks an enduring fear: the fate of Jews in a hostile gentile nation.
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Jed pores over Kup's scrapbooks; Orner includes bits and pieces here, a faded publicity photo, a summer-stock playbill. Cookie's autopsy indicated she'd been strangled, yet there was also a hint she'd died intentionally by swallowing pills. Which version is true? The similar circumstances of Marilyn Monroe's death the previous year, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Mob bosses, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI: all these paranoia-rich strands weave together in 'The Gossip Columnist's Daughter.' Among Orner's cast the newspaperman stands out. A 'buffoonish worshiper of Bing and Bob and Frank,' Irving Kupcinet (1912-2003) tirelessly worked his contacts, filing six columns per week. A mention would beam a light onto celebrities, criminals, politicians, thespians, business machers, even other journalists. Orner does right by Kup's forceful if terse personality, his all-too-human sorrow.
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Jed has conversations in his head with his smart-alecky cat; his smart-alecky sister, Lucy; and smart-alecky, long-deceased Cookie. He's drawn to Cookie, her dusky ingenue looks and bad romances; his own paeans to Saul Bellow mimic her pseudo-intellectual patter on Bertrand Russell and Bernard Baruch. In a novel about conspiracy theories, the dead conspire with the living, helping us to navigate our time on earth. The pace quickens as Jed conjures Cookie's last months. In July 1963 an actor friend drives her to Tijuana for an abortion; on the return trip he nods off at the wheel but corrects: 'The jolt wakes Cookie. Her sweat-drenched face is stuck to the seat. She peels it off the leather. 'Whoa there, partner.' Barely a whisper. Sudden, disembodied. Like her voice comes to me some nights. A little hoarse, parched. One thing all our dead must have in common is thirst.'
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The feud between the Kupcinets and the Rosenthals is a frame or setup for the crime's toll on future generations, Orner's salute to the hardboiled fictions of James M. Cain and James Ellroy, whose memoir of his mother's murder, 'My Dark Places,' serves as a model for 'The Gossip Columnist's Daughter.' In an imaginary exchange Rudy asks Jed a rhetorical question: 'Isn't your whole point — if you had a point, which you don't — that families lie to themselves, and these lies get handed down as love.' Yet the book isn't just a tale about entwined Chicago families or commentary on a diaspora people. Paranoia is pure American, older than the Constitution — the northern states, for instance, denounced the three-fifths compromise as a Southern play for dominance. Orner knows this well. His novel derives its evocative power from the language of duplicity and disinformation, the callous ways we talk past each other, stunted in echo chambers of our making. The rest is gossip.
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THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST'S DAUGHTER
By Peter Orner
Little, Brown, 448 pages, $28
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, 'This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.'
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