Overview
During pilot season, June Dietz’s husband Mitch Gold becomes another man—a man who doesn’t notice her delicious Farmers Market homemade dinners, who mumbles responses around the tooth-whitening trays in his mouth, who is consumed with envy for his fellow television actors, who pants for a return phone call from his agent. And who wants to be married to an abject, paranoid, oblivious mess? Possibly not June, whose job as a poetry professor at UCLA makes her in but not of Los Angeles, with its illogical pecking order and relentless tribal customs. Even their daughter Nora’s allegedly innocent world isn’t immune from one upsmanship: while Mitch is bested for acting jobs by the casually confident (and so very L.A.) Willie Dermot, June is tormented by Willie’s insufferably uptight wife Larissa and the other stay-at-home exercisers in the preschool.
Could Rich Friend be the answer? Smart, age-appropriate, bookish—and a wildly successful television producer—Rich focuses on June the way nobody has since she moved to Los Angeles, and there’s nothing for June to do but wallow in what she’s been missing. But what’s the next step? How does a regular person decide between husband and lover, family and fantasy?
Set in a Los Angeles you haven’t read about before, Beverly Hills Adjacent is that rare thing: a laugh-out-loud novel with heart.
Synopsis
During pilot season, June Dietz’s husband Mitch Gold becomes another man—a man who doesn’t notice her delicious Farmers Market homemade dinners, who mumbles responses around the tooth-whitening trays in his mouth, who is consumed with envy for his fellow television actors, who pants for a return phone call from his agent. And who wants to be married to an abject, paranoid, oblivious mess? Possibly not June, whose job as a poetry professor at UCLA makes her in but not of Los Angeles, with its illogical pecking order and relentless tribal customs. Even their daughter Nora’s allegedly innocent world isn’t immune from one upsmanship: while Mitch is bested for acting jobs by the casually confident (and so very L.A.) Willie Dermot, June is tormented by Willie’s insufferably uptight wife Larissa and the other stay-at-home exercisers in the preschool.
Could Rich Friend be the answer? Smart, age-appropriate, bookish—and a wildly successful television producer—Rich focuses on June the way nobody has since she moved to Los Angeles, and there’s nothing for June to do but wallow in what she’s been missing. But what’s the next step? How does a regular person decide between husband and lover, family and fantasy?
Set in a Los Angeles you haven’t read about before, Beverly Hills Adjacent is that rare thing: a laugh-out-loud novel with heart.
Publishers Weekly
Steinhauer and Hendra's debut casts a reproachful gaze on the television industry as hopeful actor Mitch Gold stumbles from audition to audition. It's pilot season, and as Mitch fails to land a role and his career woes burden his marriage, his wife, UCLA poetry professor June Dietz, begins to lose sight of tenure and catch the eye of a television writer. Though Mitch is affable and insecure, there's a predictable rhythm to his troubles: first, he auditions, then he panics. Hendra and Steinhauer are at their best when they stick to June, who is lovable and sympathetic: an amateur gourmet with a caustic wit and a longing for New York, she loves her daughter and despises the mommy politicking that runs rampant at preschool, providing a rich line of comedy as svelte mommies say they love cupcakes before cutting them into bits and spitting them out, and ostracize June for having a career. The marriage and Hollywood troubles will be familiar to fans of light Tinseltown fare, but the authors' sense of humor gives this book plenty of pep. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Steinhauer and Hendra's debut casts a reproachful gaze on the television industry as hopeful actor Mitch Gold stumbles from audition to audition. It's pilot season, and as Mitch fails to land a role and his career woes burden his marriage, his wife, UCLA poetry professor June Dietz, begins to lose sight of tenure and catch the eye of a television writer. Though Mitch is affable and insecure, there's a predictable rhythm to his troubles: first, he auditions, then he panics. Hendra and Steinhauer are at their best when they stick to June, who is lovable and sympathetic: an amateur gourmet with a caustic wit and a longing for New York, she loves her daughter and despises the mommy politicking that runs rampant at preschool, providing a rich line of comedy as svelte mommies say they love cupcakes before cutting them into bits and spitting them out, and ostracize June for having a career. The marriage and Hollywood troubles will be familiar to fans of light Tinseltown fare, but the authors' sense of humor gives this book plenty of pep. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
A debut novel about the TV industry during pilot season. An English professor at UCLA, June Dietz is out of place in Hollywood. But her husband is an actor, and his quest for work rules their lives. It's not surprising, then, that June falls for the handsome TV producer who likes poetry. Will she leave her husband, or will she find a way to save her marriage? This is the question that fuels the plot, but it's unlikely that readers will care much about the answer. Steinhauer (Los Angeles bureau chief of the New York Times) and Hendra (How To Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir, 2005) present June-a professional woman and a mother-as the real, righteous antithesis of the "stay-at-home exercisers" and other L.A. caricatures who people the novel, but June is no more appealing and at least as self-absorbed. On the whole, this novel does not suffer from an overabundance of realism. Major events turn on the fact that the heroine has either forgotten her cell phone or turned it off-a plot device that is annoying once, and which becomes ridiculous with repeated use. As satire, the book doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about Los Angeles, though there may be a potential audience in readers who long to know how a TV pilot gets made. Unfortunately those readers will have to endure such prose as, "He leaned quietly against a wall with a large white sign that read HOT SET, which meant that the room, which had been made to look like a coroner's office, would be used soon and should not be disturbed."Not very good.From the Publisher
“Crisp, fast and sharp, Beverly Hills Adjacent has an ear for the crazy cadences of Hollywood, marriage and modern life.”—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten-Year Nap"A smart novel about a Hollywood couple trying to survive TV pilot season."—People StyleWatch
"The authors' sense of humor gives this book plenty of pep."—Publishers Weekly
"A laugh-out-loud novel about the skewed mores and hungry hearts of Hollywood."—People
"Steinhauer and Hendra have a gift for Hollywood vapidspeak."—New York Times Book Review
"Like Little Children gone Hollywood...a terrific setup...the writing is so consistently good, at times lyrical...very funny scenes and memorable characters."—Los Angeles Times