Word: tryon
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...THOMAS TRYON...
Weaving fiction around such a monstrously self-mythologizing place as Hollywood is like gilding a plastic lily. That is just what Thomas Tryon unabashedly attempts in Crowned Heads. He is not writing for the ages but for the balcony...
Given the success of his three previous novels (The Other, Harvest Home, Lady), Tryon is likely to draw quite a house. Crowned Heads reels off four novellas about imaginary film stars: Fedora, a mysteriously ageless movie queen; Lorna Doone, a onetime "All-American cookie" who has begun to crumble; Bobby Ransome, a former child star with growing pains; and Willie Marsh, an elegant old leading man with some shabby private habits. Though the paths of these four characters have sometimes crossed, their stories are chiefly linked by the book's epigraph, which Tryon has lifted from Shakespeare...
...sentiment−in this context a stunning banality−tips Tryon's hand. He is belaboring a tradition that goes back at least as far as Boccaccio and John Lydgate's 15th century monstrosity The Fall of Princes−26,000 lines of bad poetry on the miseries that beset rulers. Something in human nature cannot resist being told that the richest, most powerful and most beautiful are also the most miserable. The plain fact that this is often not true has never weakened the formula's appeal, and Tryon plays it for whatever it is worth...
...Lady, Tryon...