The book of dreams

Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, lives in a house like a Norman castle with a view of the Pacific. Marta Brooks, blond and beautiful, takes classified ads for the Romance Advertiser. Victor Shaw has spent time in Soledad state prison but understands that his future lies in blackmail. Taylor Hayden, a good hit man, shines his shoes and doesn't ask questions. Zimba, a performing elephant, is not as reliable as he looks. This is Hollywood, and Craig Nova makes it seem perfectly logical that these creatures should find themselves in the same cast. In his swift, lyrical prose, comic and moving, Nova weaves disparate lives together into a novel that makes utter beauty out of the gritty and grotesque. This is a story about people who are willing to take the chance they have been waiting for all their lives, men and women trying to live up to their dreams. The Book of Dreams is also a book about California, that youthful place prematurely aged by the burden of too much longing and desire. And the look of the place, with its heartbreaking, ever-receding landscape (seen most often through car windows), haunts this novel. Like a jazz pianist, improvising snatches of other tunes while never straying far from the melody, Nova effortlessly echoes the writers who have helped us see the state in earlier times - Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, all are acknowledged here in graceful, amusing riffs. But in its exact mix of wit, acuity of vision, and evocation of desire, this novel could only have been written by Craig Nova. Indeed, The Book of Dreams demonstrates afresh that, in the words of Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, "scarcely anyone else is in Nova's league."