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Title: St. Famous: A Novel by Jonathan Dee ISBN: 0-385-47459-8 Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $22.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2 (2 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: No, no, no!
Comment: Young writers should NEVER write novels about novelists writing a novel and the difficulties they encounter and Art and Truth and Compromise and Aesthetics and...well, you get the idea. Mr. Dee is an excellent writer. His later works, especially Palladio and The Liberty Campaign, are excellent and enjoyable. Write this one off as a youthful indiscretion that had to be gotten out of his system, and under no circumstances buy or attempt to read it.

Rating: 3
Summary: The Not-Yet-Canonized Saint of Misguided Endeavors
Comment: I initially picked up this novel because the description on the inside jacket suggested that this was a story intent on pursuing answers to some of the questions surrounding the role of art in society.

The book jacket misled me.

Occasionally there are moments -brief, captivating moments- where Dee takes the time to challenge assumptions and dismantle rhetoric, but these moments are rare, and, for the most part, the book seems to just spout.

For example, almost 20 pages of "St. Famous" are devoted to Disney's The Little Mermaid and the way the Disney animation machine gutted Hans Christian Anderson's story. Paul - the main character - is introspective, even mournful, as he watches the altered fairy tale. Yet in all his turmoil and despair over the way contemporary society robs classics of their meaning, Paul never stops to consider the radical idea of taking his sons home after the movie and reading the original tale to them. Instead, he bemoans the movie, and rather than actively trying to change the status quo, Paul prefers passivity and the quiet isolation of setting himself apart from everyone else - of setting himself ABOVE everyone else.

This elitist attitude pervades the whole novel, and is, perhaps, my greatest disappointment in "St. Famous". If there is one idea this book reinforces, it is the notion that how people demonstrate their beliefs often overshadows the beliefs themselves, making the way people live out their values the gauge by which others judge the validity of those values.

Paul - representative of the idea that art should be moral and do more than just generate revenue - seems both incompetent and incomplete because of his stale arguments and shallow logic. As an artist, he can talk the talk, but he can't walk the walk. (Well, actually Paul doesn't talk the talk too well, either. He's pretentious and manages to offend or annoy most of the people he encounters.) All in all, Paul lacks every trait I find important in a spokesperson, and his platform suffers as a result.

Yet, despite the fact I think this novel's attempt to meaningfully explore the role of art in society, the function of celebrity, or the conflict between privacy and fame ultimately fall short of any legitimate examination, I still feel compelled to commend Dee for making the attempt. Although "St. Famous" doesn't shed any significant light, it acknowledges the darkness; that's at least a step in the right direction.

For anyone interested in taking the next step, I recommend Tolstoy's "What is Art?", a book filled with lively debate and weighty discussion.