Stardust

Starred review from July 6, 2009
James Ellroy fans will find a lot to like in this gritty look at post-WWII Hollywood from Edgar-winner Kanon (Los Alamos
). Ben Collier, recently returned to the U.S. from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, travels to California after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious fall from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects someone pushed Danny out the window and turns amateur detective to identify the culprit. In a noirish twist, the widowed Liesl comes on to Ben. The stakes rise after Ben learns Danny was playing a part in an anticommunist crusade a congressman is launching against the film industry. Kanon perfectly balances action and introspection, while smoothly integrating such real-life figures as actress Paulette Goddard into the plot.

Starred review from August 1, 2009
Kanon's atmospheric, character-driven latest (Alibi, 2005, etc.) comes within a whisker of being flawless.

Hollywood, 1945: a place where an observer as shrewd as Ben Collier could easily conclude,"Nothing can lie like a smile." Lots of smilers, lots of lies, lots of reasons for Ben not to believe that his brother Danny's death was either a suicide or an accident, though both have been put forward as explanations. Still in uniform, Signal Corps officer Ben arrives in Hollywood on assignment to make a Nazi death-camp documentary for the army. He'll work under the auspices of Continental Films and Sol Lasner, its pepper-pot founder and boss. But there's a subtext, of course. In Germany, where they were boys, Ben adored his charismatic older brother. Danny's charm, unflagging energy and zest for life were givens in the Kohler household. Suicide? Never! Accident? Well, perhaps, but Ben can't be convinced of its likelihood. Though circumstances, mostly those attendant on being a Jew under Hitler, uprooted and eventually separated them, the brothers had remained in touch as best they could, while leading far-flung and disparate lives: Ben a soldier, Danny a movie producer. A movie producer with enigmatic sides to him, Ben discovers as his investigation intensifies. There's the mystery surrounding his role as husband, for instance, to the beautiful Liesl, who will come to loom large in Ben's own life. There are the unsettling ways Danny seems connected to the infamous Congressional Red-baiting that's breaking so many careers and hearts now that the Russians are no longer U.S. allies. His brother had bitter enemies, Ben soon realizes. Which one was a murderer?

Yes, it's too long, resulting in a certain noticeable softness around the middle, but time and place are so vividly evoked, and the writing is so strong, that most readers will be of a mind to forgive.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 15, 2009
GI Ben Collier comes to Hollywood in 1945 to make a documentary about the concentration camps. The son of a filmmaker executed by the Nazis, Ben, who has ties to Continental Pictures as well as the German émigré community, is ideal for the project. His task is immediately complicated, however, when his brother falls from an apartment window. Ben soon learns that he had Communist sympathies and might have been murdered. But was he working for or against a grandstanding, Red-baiting congressman? To uncover the truth, Ben will have to untangle his family's murky past. With his usual mastery of historical milieus and the subtleties of complex characters, Kanon ("Alibi") immerses the reader in the glamour of Hollywood just before it comes under investigation. VERDICT While not as engrossing as some of Kanon's earlier efforts (e.g., "Los Alamos"), especially for those without a healthy background knowledge of the period, this ambitious novel is for anyone interested in Hollywood in the late 1940s or the film industry's response to the era's congressional witch hunts.Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2009
In his fifth novel, Kanon returns to his signature theme: the postwar world and the lingering effects of the so-called Good War on those who fought it and those who endured its horrors. The war left its most visible scars in Berlin, of course, the setting of Kanons The Good German (2001); in Venice, where Alibi (2005) took place, the landscape was relatively undisturbed, but the survivors carried their own internal burdens. Thats true even in Hollywood, where Ben Collier arrives to oversee production of an army documentary on the death camps and to attend his brother, in a coma after whats being called either an accident or a suicide attempt. After his brother dies, Ben is thrown into the German Jewish expatriate communitywriters, musicians, and actors who, like his own mother, escaped the Nazis while it was still possible to leave. Convinced that his brother was murdered, Ben attempts to track back what happened and finds trouble on multiple fronts: the labor unrest that is gripping Hollywood; his brothers possible involvement in the seeds of what would shortly become Joseph McCarthys reign of terror; and, on a personal level, the sexual attraction drawing him to his dead brothers wife. Kanon manipulates his plot and setting expertly, evoking both a James Ellroylike postwar noir atmosphere and, at the same time, capturing the surface glamour of Hollywoods fading golden age (Paulette Goddard and other real-life figures make cameos). If this juxtaposition of noir sensibility against Tinseltown melodrama sometimes fails to meld smoothly, the novel nevertheless re-creates a time and a place with pinpoint accuracy and reminds us once again that the wounds of war take time to heal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)