The Song Is You
Tags: crime-fiction,
Megan Abbott’s novel is set in late 1940s Hollywood, during the studios’ golden era. The main character, Gil “Hop” Hopkins, is a publicist and fixer for one of the studios. His job is to generate good press for the stars and to suppress bad press that might turn the public off. Hop has plenty of work to do because his wards are always getting into trouble. He is a glib, smooth-talking salesman type, apparently handsome and well-dressed, a bit of a seducer who’s not above bribing cops and waiters when necessary, to keep them from talking about the misbehavior of celebrities whose reputations he is paid to protect.
Hop goes out drinking one night with actresses Jean Spangler and Iolene Harper. They drift from a dive bar in Santa Monica to a whorehouse in San Pedro, where Spangler disappears into a seedy room with two of Hollywood’s top actors, Gene Merrell and Marv Sutton. Merrell and Sutton appear in musicals as a couple of wholesome all-American soldier boys. In real life, they’re out-of-control boozers with a taste for rough sex.
Hop wakes up the morning after to find that Jean Spangler’s sister has filed a missing person report with LAPD. She never returned home from that night out. An exhaustive search turns up only her purse and a note about needing to see a doctor. As the case of the missing woman gathers media attention, Hop goes on the offensive, covering up whatever tracks Sutton and Merrel may have left. He doesn’t want the studio boys to be implicated in whatever happened.
Jean Spangler was a real person. She really did disappear on the night of October 7, 1949, just as she did in the book. Hers is one of the few high-profile cases the LAPD was never able to solve. Her body was never found, and no one knows if she was murdered or simply disappeared.
One day, long after the murder, Iolene Harper, who was with Hop and Jean the night Jean disappeared, comes to Hop seeking… something. Hop isn’t quite sure what, and neither is the reader. Her reappearance seems to prick Hop’s conscience. He now knows that Sutton and Merrell are not the upstanding citizens they play onscreen. Hop seems to almost regret having cleaned up for them (almost, because Hop almost has a conscience) and he begins to wonder what really happened to Spangler.
So begins his investigation. Hop talks to Sutton, he revisits the places they went on Spangler’s last night, and he interviews a number of witnesses who have new information. He begins to understand that Iolene Harper has reason to fear for her life.
I won’t give away any more of the plot, though I will say that Hop is a deeply conflicted character who only ever does the right thing against his will. At bottom, he is an amoral mercenary, using his charm and smooth tongue to get the worst people in Hollywood out of trouble, giving them the freedom to go out and make more trouble.
As the book unfolds, we see how grim his view of humanity has become. In nineteen forties Hollywood, all the women he encounters are trying to sleep their way to the top. All of the men are perfectly willing to screw them and cast them aside. The whole town, and the whole industry, was built on sexual power dynamics in which each sex has what the other wants, and all the bargaining happens between bodies in the bedroom. The whole book is drenched with sex, but none of it is appealing sex. It’s sex as business, desperate people using whatever means they have to climb out of the hole they’re in.
Abott paints a detailed and seedy portrait of old Hollywood. Many famous actors make cameos. I admire the author’s fidelity to historical fact, and her mastery of the language of the era. Over time, however, the shallowness of the banter becomes annoying. Much more annoying are the descriptions of what’s going on in Hop’s mind. He keeps almost having complete thoughts. He keeps almost having actual feelings. After the first hundred pages, you start thinking, “Can you please just tell me what he’s actually thinking and feeling? Can you please finish a sentence? You don’t need to leave me hanging on every detail. If he likes the sandwich, just say he likes it, for Christ’s sake.”
Abbott’s descriptions of Hop’s thinking can be boiled down to lines like, “Midge was just so damn… If he could only…”
Midge was so damn what? If Hop could only do what? Can’t you let the reader into his thoughts after a hundred and fifty pages? Two hundred pages?
The writing style does fit the character. Hop doesn’t really know his own thoughts. He’s an incomplete person, devoid of moral sense and completely unable to deal with the emotions women arouse in him. He can sleep with them, and he can want to sleep with them, but he can’t relate to them on any human level.
Another problem with the writing is that virtually all of it is metaphorical rather than literal. Every time Hop talks with another character, you find yourself trying to decode his vague, non-concrete language to figure out who he is talking about and what he is saying about them. The same goes for the narrator. Over the course of two-hundred-forty pages, the reader becomes increasingly frustrated at having to re-read and decipher vaguely worded sentences inferring that Hop is saying he bribed someone, or was attracted to someone else, or fought with his ex-wife about something. If these details matter to the story, just spill them. Don’t make us work for every crumb.
After the first half of the book, I had little incentive to continue, but I did stick it out. What do we learn in the end? Not much. What does Hop learn? That he is just as shallow as the reader sees him to be, and that he has about as much tolerance for his own hollow company as the reader does. He seems to look at himself and say, “Life can’t really be this empty, can it? Well, maybe it is. I might as well get drunk and get laid.”
On a deeper level, this book is about power, greed, desire, status, gender roles and illusion in old Hollywood. It’s not a pretty picture, all glamour on the outside and rot on the inside. Reading the book is like spending a night in a dive bar with a bunch of young, good-looking, hopeless drunks. You might have some fun along the way, but then you wake up with the ick and wonder how anyone could spend their whole life like that.
Abbott is obviously a gifted writer. I look forward to reading more of her work. This one just didn’t cut it for me.