You or Someone Like You

April 6, 2009
With this academia-obsessed novel, New York Times
perfume critic Burr branches out from his nonfiction scent-based books. Howard Rosenbaum is a Jewish powerhouse in Hollywood with an Anglo-Saxon wife, Anne, whom he met at Columbia University, where they both earned Ph.D.s in literature. Now they live among “pathologically narcissistic” people with an “utter disdain for the written word.” But when narrator Anne is solicited to compile a book list for Dreamworks CEO Stacey Snider (Burr weaves actual Hollywood bigwigs into the tale), the list becomes a small book club, then morphs into a huge gathering with Anne the literary guru to virtually all of Hollywood. Anne and Howard’s only child, Sam, travels to Israel, and Howard’s initial delight sours when Sam is rejected by a rabbi in Jerusalem for an intensive study “program” because he is not officially Jewish and therefore “unclean.” A true celebration of intellect, Burr’s tale does, occasionally, misstep into a pedantic bog, but ultimately examines the personal decision each of us must make to run from, or embrace, our identity.

Starred review from May 1, 2009
In this fiction debut, journalist Burr (The Perfect Scent, 2008, etc.) offers the tale of a movie executive's wife leading a book-discussion group.

Anne Hammersmith met Howard Rosenbaum at Columbia University, where they both received their doctorates in English literature. Soon after graduation he got an opportunity to produce movies in Hollywood, and after negotiating some difficult fertility issues, they had a son, Sam. Eventually Anne is able to indulge her love for literature in an unusual way, by starting a book club for people in the movie industry. This would seem to be an uphill battle, for even though the air is full of talk about scripts, as one of Howard's acquaintances informs Anne,"Nobody reads in Hollywood." Anne is one of those people able to discern literature's connections to her own life, so the books she chooses for the discussion group serve as a commentary on her family relationships and social position. Tolstoy on dinner parties (in Anna Karenina), Auden on"namelessness" and identity in the modern age, George Eliot on anti-Semitism and what to do with one's life (in Romola) all elucidate Anne's increasingly frayed social and domestic bonds. Sam, a preternaturally precocious boy who grew up doting on the clever wordplay and allusions of his literary parents, as a teenager reveals that he's gay, but also becomes increasingly interested in the religious heritage of his father. Howard, previously a thoroughly secular Jew, begins to move toward orthodoxy, which both hurts and frustrates Anne. The religious divisions Howard erects are barriers to their marriage, she contends:"If you are now a Jew and I am now a Gentile, you have now placed me in a fundamentally different category of human beings from yours. We are divided."

A savvy novel that deals with Hollywood from a cultural rather than a tabloid perspective.

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April 1, 2009
A love story rolled up in literature lessons makes "New York Times" scent critic Burr's ("The Emperor of Scent") fiction debut a truly novel work. The narrator is the incandescent, opinionated, very well read, and professorial Anne. Born in England, the child of diplomats, Anne marries the Brooklyn-born and equally erudite Howard Rosenbaum, and they produce a very precocious son, Samuel. Anne's natural sense of otherness, heightened by her Jewish in-laws' lack of enthusiasm at their marriage, is further stretched when Howard accepts a studio executive position and moves the family to Los Angeles. Anne struggles to find a niche for herself, finally meeting success the moment she sets up a book club at the behest of a couple of Howard's colleagues. Anne's brilliance in running this salon fuels Hollywood's boundless hunger for the next great screenplay. Soon Anne is dividing her book readers by film industry types, multiplying the number of groups, and her business is born. What of the love story? The differences of faith between Anne and Howard surface after their son returns from a trip to Israel, and Anne must work her literary magic to retrieve their love. If only for the lessons in linguistics and literature, this is recommended for all fiction collections.Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2009
Blond British beauty Anne Rosenbaum can pinpoint the precise moment when her marriage began to fall apart. She and her Hollywood studio-executive husband, Howard, had been living the good life in Los Angeles, doing deals, dining in exclusive restaurants, and delighting in the pleasures of good conversation. (Anne had recently begun a book club, which was all the rage among the show-biz elite.) Then teenage son Sam returns from a two-week visit to Israel, rattled to the core. He had been summarily ousted from a yeshiva by an Orthodox rabbi who informed him that, because Anne was Gentile, Sam wasnt a real Jew. The news awakens a religious fanaticism in Howard that threatens to unravel his loving relationship with his wife. Anne attempts to communicate with Howard through literatureAuden, Tolstoy, even Shakespeares King Lear. Can the words of the masters reach her husband when she cannot? Chronic name-dropping and copious details of the rich and vacuous distract from New York Times perfume critic Burrs otherwise substantive fiction debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)