Novels

Tales of the Patriarchs

Many American novelists have written about Hollywood in a realistic or satirical style. But to my knowledge, although it is one of the great mythologies of American life, no one has looked at Hollywood through the expressionistic lens of magic realism.

Tales of the Patriarchs is a magic realist fable of the wideopen early days of Hollywood when a handful of dreamers created a new art form in a desert by the sea. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez and F. Scott Fitzgerald had lunch at Schwabs’ Drugstore and scribbled on the back of a napkin a 500 page deal memo that won an Academy Award for best screenplay it might be this book.

Film is magic, dreamlike, archetypal, a kind of mythology. Hollywood is the land where the myth was born. Filled with the romance, black comedy and pornography of the human soul, Tales of the Patriarchs explores the truths, the legends and the lies behind the lives of the patriarchs who created it.

Judah Ben Mayer is the excessive, driven studio chief, idlike, voracious, torn between a great urge to create and a rage to destroy. Sidney Thrall is his fabled boy wonder, a prodigious genius whose physical and psychic childhood wounds heal imperfectly into the ambitions of his adult life. Norma Desmond is the brilliant actress who comes between them, urgent, impulsive, creative, a vessel for the madness of the world she lives in. Addicted to their dreams, these three fight for love and power only to destroy each other in a mad world of creative genius, sex and fame, the magic world of Hollywood.


Tales of the Patriarchs Many American novelists have written about Hollywood in a realistic or satirical style. But to my knowledge, although it is one of the great mythologies of American life, no one has looked at Hollywood through the expressionistic lens of magic realism. Tales of the Patriarchs is a magic realist fable of the wideopen early days of Hollywood when a handful of dreamers created a new art form in a desert by the sea. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez and F. Scott Fitzgerald had lunch at Schwabs’ Drugstore and scribbled on the back of a napkin a 500 page deal memo that won an Academy Award for best screenplay it might be this book. Film is magic, dreamlike, archetypal, a kind of mythology. Hollywood is the land where the myth was born. Filled with the romance, black comedy and pornography of the human soul, Tales of the Patriarchs explores the truths, the legends and the lies behind the lives of the patriarchs who created it. Judah Ben Mayer is the excessive, driven studio chief, idlike, voracious, torn between a great urge to create and a rage to destroy. Sidney Thrall is his fabled boy wonder, a prodigious genius whose physical and psychic childhood wounds heal imperfectly into the ambitions of his adult life. Norma Desmond is the brilliant actress who comes between them, urgent, impulsive, creative, a vessel for the madness of the world she lives in. Addicted to their dreams, these three fight for love and power only to destroy each other in a mad world of creative genius, sex and fame, the magic world of Hollywood.
		Notes Towards A Theory Of The Chaos At The Heart Of Things Notes Towards A Theory Of The Chaos At The Heart Of Things is a black comedy about love, money, genius and madness set in the rarefied worlds of Wall Street and Westchester County. Gideon Fine was a Wall Street quant, a mathematical genius with a head full of software that conquered the Financial District and made him rich. Then he lost everything: his fortune, his good name, his beautiful voracious wife, his brilliant skittish teenage son, the trophy house in Katonah, his dying father’s respect. All he has left is his beat-up Porsche and a notebook containing a stunningly original deep mathematical proof with which he plans to win them all back. But there may be something seriously wrong with his proof. And there may be something seriously wrong with Gideon. In Notes Towards A Theory of The Chaos At The Heart Of Things, Gideon goes on a haunting, subterranean journey of selfdiscovery that begins amid the wealth and privacy of Wall Street success and descends to the derelict streets of the Lower East Side, as Gideon looks for the one true theorem that will tame the chaos in the financial markets, the chaos in his life, the chaos in his heart. Narrated by Gideon, his wife Mindy, his business partner Howie and his son Bobby by turns, Notes Towards A Theory of The Chaos At The Heart Of Things tells the sad and funny tale of a man who lives on the border between genius and delusion, walking a thin line of sanity as he discovers the true cost of creativity and illumination. It is a story of invention and madness, love and obsession, friendship and betrayal.