Here is an excerpt from The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin. It’s a sequel to The Player. Griffin Mill, played by Tim Robbins in the movie by Robert Altman, observes a woman at a party amongst the richest of the rich of L.A. I love reading passages like this.
“That’s Candace,” said Lisa.
Griffin wanted to hit himself on the head to adjust the picture. You see actresses you love, movie stars, powerfully talented, panicked by the injustice of the punishment for age lines, who go to the wrong plastic surgeon and destroy their careers more completely than death by making themselves look like female impersonators of who they used to be, their lips puffed as though attacked by swarms of bees from an organic hive, eyelids stapled deep into the sockets, beach-ball bosoms, and forehead frozen with Botox into an emotional unintelligibility useful for the championship of the World Series of Power. No, what happened to Candace Netter Ginsberg, or what she had chosen to have happen, this was way, way On Beyond Zebra, this was supermarket tabloid-cover kidnappers from outer space meet Egyptian cat god, an Egyptian goddess made in their own image by the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the squared chin and high cheeks and broad nose of a cat, with the tilted ovoid eye sockets an enlarged forehead of a true believer’s idea of wise beings from ancient galaxies. The reconstruction had severed every nerve in her face, so that nothing moved, or even twitched, except her eyes and her jaw. She spoke as though her teeth were wired shut. This was everything that’s wrong with everything. But…but…but…this creature was Candace Netter Ginsberg, and Griffin knew her and loved her from her book. She suffered and the stunning, clear, and forgiving eyes of a dying sacrificial victim whose endurance of suffering would bring her torturers to repentance, if torturers have souls.
And then a little later.
[Griffin] wanted to tell her that her freakishness challenged all who looked at-well, upon, yes, who looked upon her-who looked upon her to see, instead of punished vanity and its scars, yes, to see within the lifted horrifying face an icon of the risen Christ, even if it was a little like the face of crucified Christ on a Mexican-restaurant bleeding-Jesus-crown-of-thorns hologram, with the three dimensional eyes that follow you around the room.
This is another case where I loved reading the book because of passages like those. I loved his language, and I would recommend it just because of that. I will give this caveat. Like Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, the author lets the reader down with a ridiculous, implausible ending.
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