Hollywood Divorces

Jackie Collins
(Simon & Schuster) $39.95 HB

Jackie Collins is the author of twenty-three provocative and controversial international bestsellers. She lives in Beverly Hills, California. It wasn't me who wrote the last two sentences; they were just copied from the dust-jacket. I am using them here to demonstrate the difference between me and Jackie Collins: when I write it's usually being written by me, just some stuff which I come up with. When Jackie writes she is channeling forces way beyond herself, calling forth the great corporate imagination of America and expressing it in the form of a story.

Hollywood Divorces is a fascinating exploration of the themes of penis size and product placement. The story is just a kind of shell: its characters, motives and turning points are jagged and unnatural footholds in the narrative ascent, ironic parodies of conventional novelistic form. Page one sets the tone:

Shelby Cheney had it all. Or did she?

This parody of narrative suspense artfully undoes the reader's expectation of desire and fulfillment. The real substance of the book lies somewhere below the narrative level, in an intricate subplot of the subconscious, where the author plays out her private fantasies of sex with robots, and dreamscape encounters with the gigantic vending machine that is commonly referred to as 'Hollywood'.

A series of male and female characters are paraded before us. Are they characters, or just bodies labelled with names? Shelby Cheney, Linc Blackwood, Jump Jagger, Lola Sanchez - they have perforated the veil of human life, and moved into a new territory where realistic names would be only an encumbrance. The female characters barely conceal the prosthetic bodies of steel and silicone that lurk beneath their skins. The male characters deconstruct the traditional concept of man/appendage, giving their penises centre stage in the narrative, thus recontructing the rest of their bodies as mere appendages. As each male character is introduced, we are soon given an appraisal of his member - but there is one exception. Linc Blackwood, an action movie star, and husband of Shelby Cheney, holds a special place in the dream. His penis remains an unidentified, unquantifiable entity. It is the missing linc in the unfathomable dream. It has transcended physical size, and gained an ethereal status, thus reconstituting Linc's body as the authentic human corpus.

With Shelby and Linc occupying their own vortex at the centre of the novel, the only thing that holds the other characters together on the same plain of reality is the presence of shared brand-names. The naming of products is the new basis of metaphysical grounding. Cat Harrison 'grabs her iPod, lays down on the bed, puts on her Bose headphones and begins listening to Eminem at full volume.' The imposition of these greater forces gives us the first clue that Jackie is not writing Hollywood Divorces, she is but a medium in the transfer of corporate information.

Hollywood Divorces is constructed from 'scenes' of only 2-5 pages, a sort of fast-editing that gives it the same visceral impact as Video Hits. The reader's so-called identity, a pathetic struggle to engage with the elusive concept of human life, disappears into oblivion. Reality has just left the building.

Review by John Mansfield

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