The Movies of My Life

Alberto Fuguet

A trick does not a book make, no matter how interesting it is. And the trick ehre is interesting; Fuguet takes the structure of a noted director (can't remember who, because my brain is swiss cheese; Elia Kazan?)'s autobiography and turns it into the story of a family trying to make it. The beginning works very well, being a series of emails between the narrator and someone he met on a plane about why he's decided to simply abandon his career and sit in a Los Angeles hotel room writing this, and the structure is intriguing, but beauty is only skin-deep. Once you scratch beneath the surface, you find another Oprah's Book Club candidate ripe for the plucking, a dysfunctional family with no qualities to make it stand out from the rest of the dysfunctional family pack so popular in today's publishing world.

If you like dysfunctional family novels, this will probably be right up your alley. The rest of you can safely avoid it.