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Cheat and Charmer
Elizabeth Frank. Random House: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 1400060915. 560 pages.
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Flip to the inside cover of Elizabeth Frank's enticing new novel and you'll find this ambitious promise: "Twenty-five years in the making, a first novel that has already been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Last Tycoon, Cheat and Charmer is certain to be one of the most admired literary debates of the season." Well, we're happy to say that we concur.
And we're also happy to endorse the endorsement of John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation, who offers this persuasive pitch: "Cheat and Charmer begins with an act of betrayal that escalates with dazzling skill and moral complexity into every form of betrayal imaginable. . . . The few times I put it down to leave the house and do reality things, I found myself missing the world of this book and hurried happily back home to it." Okay, now that we've let everyone else do the talking for us, we'll see what we can add to the general hoopla. In short, Cheat and Charmer is the Great American Novel of the Hollywood Blacklist. It's the story of a Hollywood wife who rats on her beloved-but-treacherous sister in order to save her increasingly successful screenwriter husband from the vicious clutches of the Great American Witch Hunt of the Twentieth Century. This debacle from our not-so-distant past was also known as the House Un-American Activities Committee, headed by Grand Inquisitor Joseph McCarthy. Sex, sisterhood, scandal, cinema, politics, and betrayal-an irresistibly mouth-watering recipe for your vicarious pleasure, served up by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Elizabeth Frank. Not too shabby for a first novel.
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