A Way of Life, Like Any Other

This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a "little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction" (Salon). He's a child of 1940s Hollywood--specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator of this exquisitely crafted dark comedy loses his youthful idyll and accompanies his lovesick mother on a vodka-soaked international quest for romance and redemption. Meanwhile, his father lives in "diminished circumstances" in California, clinging to his silver-screen mementos, trusting that, someday soon, his ex-wife and his career will return. Tired of tending bar at his mother's parties and listening to his father's sad tales of former glory, the boy moves in with his best friend's family in Beverly Hills. But nothing in La-La Land is quite what it seems, and when his new home turns out to be just as dysfunctional as the last, our teenage hero must somehow learn to accept his parents while finding the courage to break free and become his own man. This award-winning novel, "a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation" (GQ), was cited by the Guardian as one of the "ten best neglected literary masterpieces." Written by a New York Times-bestselling author who was a child of Hollywood movie stars himself, it has been praised for its "spectacularly deadpan humor" by the Atlantic Monthly and called "an insightful coming-of-age tale" by the Austin Chronicle.

About the Author :
Darcy O'Brien (1939-1998) was born in Los Angeles, California. He is a bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, including the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning novel A Way of Life, Like Any Other, based on his experiences with his movie-star parents, George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill; The Hidden Pope, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; The Hillside Stranglers, which became a bestseller and was made into an NBC TV movie; and Murder in Little Egypt, winner of the Edgar Award. O'Brien's knowledge of the field of criminal justice made him a frequent speaker and panelist on television and radio, and he published numerous articles in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Review :
"[A] little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction." --Salon "A hysterically funny coming-of-age story set in Hollywood in the '40s . . . a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation." --GQ "How is it that this minor comic masterpiece could ever have gone out of print? Darcy O'Brien's 1977 novel . . . takes us into an alien culture, Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and evokes that kitschy world with spectacularly deadpan humor." --Michael Dirda, The Atlantic Monthly "A hilarious addition to the fabulous Hollywood novel, this time laconic, understated, deadpan, ruthlessly cutting from scene to scene and character to character, and both witty and moving. I enjoyed it enormously, and recommend it unreservedly as a funny, serious, literate, and intelligent book." --The Guardian "It is the real thing . . . It's bound to go like a greyhound, fast and fine." --Seamus Heaney