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So many "crazy" things happen in AM Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life (Granta, £12.99), a new fable of Los Angeles, that the reader might feel on surface acquaintance the need either to flip the book straight into the bin, or sigh indulgently and intone with a knowing grin: "Only in Tinseltown, man."
A spooky, UFO-shaped indent suddenly appears outside the house of the hero, Richard Novak; a helicopter, belonging to a film star, swoops in to airlift a stranded pony from his garden; a down-and-out neighbour turns out to be a great Beat writer who has Bob Dylan round for tea; and a stoner teenager turns out to have narrowly missed out on an Oscar for a documentary he made, aged 11, about a friend with leukaemia (it must always be leukaemia).
Only in Tinseltown, indeed.
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tim auld enjoys
a new fable
about Tinseltown, redemption and pony-rescue
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But scratch beneath the surface and there's a beating heart of a novel here.
Novak - divorced, retired, wealthy - is a man so organised (he eats no evil, drinks no evil, has sex with no evil) that his life has come to a standstill. A sudden, catastrophic medical scare brings him face to face with death - and, of course, life - in the form of a doughnut salesman, a woman in flight from her family, that smelly Beat writer and, most of all, the son he walked out on all those years ago.
In the end, it's a well crafted story of change against the odds, of a man redeeming time when men least thought he would or could. But it's also a deeper meditation on the limits of redemption, on the cruelty of time, and on the fickleness of worldly things.
More than just another LA story, then. 
FIRST
POSTED MAY 16, 2006
Ray Banks's Saturday's Child
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