Word: condonement
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...ECSTASY BUSINESS by Richard Condon. 306 pages. Dial...
Hollywood is beyond parody. Almost anything said or written about it, no matter how absurd, somehow, somewhere, some time comes close to the truth. Author Richard Condon, who spent 22 years as a pressagent for Producers Cecil B. DeMille, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, et a!., has tried to defy that basic Hollywood tenet by inventing a story so preposterous that it cannot possibly seem real. He has only partly succeeded...
...plot is hallucinogenic, the characters are monstrous, and the style is Beverly Hills baroque. Yet Condon's grotesque farce is often merely the truth as seen in the wobbles of an amusement-park mirror. The book, which drifted past most critics and customers recently without creating much of a stir, is not on a par with the mad master's Manchurian Candidate. But in its own way, it deserves a small place on the shelf that includes Nathanael West...
...Condon's hero is Tynan Bryson, a Welsh movie star-an obvious fiction, since there is no such thing as a Welsh movie star. Tyson has had only one failure in his 46 pictures (a Hungarian director persuaded him to portray Thomas Jefferson as Richard Nixon might have played him). And he has finally achieved his and every other actor's dream: his contract calls for him to receive exactly 100% of the total gross of his next production...
...work on his latest and worst film-a tale of New York suitably titled Bronek's Cheer-when he suddenly begins getting threatening messages and attempts are made on his life. Suspense survives for a time amid the farce, then separates like fragments from a grenade. What Condon fans will enjoy are his extravagant prose arias, including the account of a typical McCobb breakfast. For rhapsodic and inventive list making* it is unequaled by anything since the Glass family's medicine cabinet in Franny and Zooey...