Entertaining: Temptation

Temptation by Douglas Kennedy
ARC, 320 pages
Published April 2012 by Atria Books
ISBN13: 9781451602104
Read February 2012
Get it: Goodreads, IndieBound, Powell's Books, Amazon

From the opening line, you know something bad is going to happen. The entire time you are reading, you are just waiting for the "other shoe to drop". You know it will and can even see it coming, but you won't realize how bad it is until the shoe drops. And oh my what a huge shoe it is.

Douglas Kennedy is a wonderful storyteller. This book breezed by for me and I'm not a fast reader. I was worried because the chapters were so long, but it flowed so well that I would become totally immersed in the story.  

While reading Temptation I could never put my finger on why I was so drawn to it. When I read the summary and saw the cover of a previous edition, I thought it was a modernized The Great Gatsby. It does have a sheen of glamor that glosses the surface of the scandal. I'm not a Hollywood gossip tabloid reader, so I wasn't overly drawn to the scandal. And before you start thinking typical Hollywood scandal, let me stop you right there. David is a script writer, so not the celebrity scandal you think. However, he does possibly commit the worst crime a writer can (and no it wasn't killing off your favorite character). It is the type of crime that gets one blackballed.

The combination of Kennedy's excellent storytelling and relateable characters drew me to the story. Notice I didn't say likeable. Some of the characters aren't really likeable. And this might be a point I struggled with. I wanted to like David. I always root for the underdog and immediately I was rooting for David. But he cheats on his wife, that doesn't tend to be the kind of people I like. But I definitely didn't like his wife, which in a usual situation I would be on the wife's side. So my character loyalties were all topsy turvy.

While reading Temptation, I participated in a chat about whether a book needs a purpose other than entertainment. If you think about it, out of all the forms of entertainment, books are almost always thought to provide more than entertainment. Before reading Temptation, I would have said books expand one's horizon, provides thought-provoking content, and a slew of other "purposes". Reading Temptation was purely entertainment. And perhaps it was this paradigm shift that left me unsettled at the end.

I thought that the story would be a moral lesson of sorts. Is it our bad choices that lead us to a given point in life? Or are there outside factors? Can we own up to our bad choices or will we always look for the scapegoat, the one to point a finger at as the cause of all the problems? These questions could have easily been addressed by the story and were touched on. The story definitely made me think of these questions.

When I read a book, I like to know at the end that the characters will be okay. I'm not sure if David learned anything or if it will just be business at usual. I had hope that he would be fine, but an interaction with a studio higher up had me wondering if it was false hope.

I could go on about why the ex-wife irked me, the stupid, idiotic things David did, or the creepy Phil that anyone with half a brain would know to stay away from. But that would take away from the good feeling of having read something purely for entertainment. While there was a bit of doom and gloom, there were light moments. If nothing else the ridiculousness of how everything spins out of control will have you laughing loudly (I scared my dog at one point because a line just hit me as funny. And not that it was particularly funny in itself, but it indicated how far things had spiraled out of control.)

If you are looking for something "fluffy" that isn't romance, but still just a fun read pick up a copy of Temptation.

Your turn now: What is the biggest crime a writer can commit? Does a book need a bigger purpose than just to be entertainment? Why or why not?

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Temptation by Douglas Kennedy

Waiting on Wednesday...

Temptation by Douglas Kennedy

From the New York Times bestselling author of Leaving the World comes the brilliant, breathtaking story about a Hollywood screenwriter whose “overnight success” brings about his biggest downfall.

Like all screenwriters in Tinsel Town, David Armitage wants to be rich and famous. Finally, after eleven years of disappointment and failure, big-time luck comes his way when one of his scripts is bought for television, making him the new toast of Hollywood as the creator of a smash hit series.

Suddenly a major power player, Armitage begins to reinvent himself at breakneck speed, quitting his day job, trading in his Reagan-era Volvo for a Porsche, and leaving his wife and daughter for a sleek, young producer.

Enter multibillionaire film buff Philip Fleck, who proposes an unsavory collaboration to the screenwriter. Armitage takes the bait and suddenly finds himself entering a decidedly Faustian pact—and unknowingly hopping an express ride to the lower depths of the Hollywood jungle. From Goodreads.com

I received this book as an ARC earlier this year. I've already read it and I'll be posting my review closer to the release date of April 24. But I will go ahead and tell you it was a great read. Douglas Kennedy is a wonderful storyteller. Last week so many people came to my blog to read his guest post from November I thought I would share Temptation as I am sure many of you have it on your waiting list (and if you don't you should).

Also, I wanted to tell you about a promotion from Lucinda Literary. By pre-ordering Kennedy's next book TEMPTATION you can receive a free hardcover of THE MOMENT a #1 Bestseller. (See video interview)
OR, for even bigger rewards, join Lucinda's Literary's Fangelist effort by emailing info(at)lucindaliterary.com. Your help in this grassroots advocacy program for authors can earn you an entire portfolio of Kennedy books.

LIKE Douglas Kennedy on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DouglasKennedyBooks

Pre-order from Powell's Books or Amazon
Add to your Goodreads shelf

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine.

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The Moment by Douglas Kennedy (promo)

The Moment by Douglas Kennedy

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine, in touch only with his daughter and still trying to recover from the end of a long marriage, his solitude is disrupted one wintry morning by the arrival of a box that is postmarked Berlin. The name on the box—Dussmann—unsettles him completely, for it belongs to the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin at a time when the city was cleaved in two and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War.
Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless is forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person and in the process relive those months in Berlin when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann,
he woman to whom he lost his heart, was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow that gradually rewrote both their destinies.
A love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power, The Moment explores why and how we fall in love—and the way we project on to others that which our hearts so desperately seek. From Goodreads.com

Follow:
www.facebook.com/douglaskennedybooks
Twitter: @DouglasLKennedy

Reviews:
Kelly's [Former] France Blog
Serendiptious Moments
That's What She Read

Buy:
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From Powell's Book
From B&N

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Douglas Kennedy: Guilty as Charged (a guest post)

I'm happy to introduce to you an internationally loved and New York Times best selling author, Douglas Kennedy. This week Mr. Kennedy had his novel The Moment published in the US after it debuted in France as a #1 best seller in French translation. Mr. Kennedy graciously agreed to visit Girl Who Reads as part of his publishing kick-off events. Thank you, Mr. Kennedy, for stopping by and providing the wonderful guest post on being an internationally read author.

When asked how and why I ended up being published in twenty-two languages - and waking up one morning (so to speak) to discover that I was now perhaps the most read contemporary American novelist in France - I put down this success to perhaps two specific things. The first is that my novels - stylistically accessible, yet (I hope) highly intelligent accounts of the way we live now, and the dilemmas that run constantly through our lives - seemed to chime in with a certain French sensibility. The fact that the novels also have a philosophical underside to them - but are also page-turners - has also meant that I have a readership in France that extends from taxi drivers to professors at the Sorbonne. The other key element to my success in France is due to the fact that, ten years ago, I made a conscious decision to learn French. At the time I was married and living in London - and my novels were just taking off in France. So I found a French teacher in the UK and forced myself into a routine of four one-hour private lessons per week. I also found a studio apartment in Paris, and started living in the city one week a month. And I insisted with all Francophone that I only spoke ‘dans la langue de Moliere”.

My press person at my French publishers, Belfond, then dropped me in the deep end, by insisting (a year after I started my lessons) that I do all interviews in French. Trust me, this was baptism by fire - but within three years my conversational skills had improved wildly. Now, a decade on, I am completely at ease in the language and think nothing about going on French radio for an hour and blabbing away in a language which has become like a second skin to me. But - and I must emphasize this - fluent French is not obligatory for literary success in the country that still considers writers to be truly special. I know that Paul Auster speaks excellent French (and is hugely respected here). But there are many American writers - Philip Roth, Jim Harrison, Colum McCann (who, like me, is also Irish), Jonathan Franzen - who do amazingly well in France, and are not fluent in the language. The French love writers. But they will love you even more if you do speak their language... as fluent French is also understandably taken to be a sign of respect for the country. And I have a huge respect for France - and the fact that they still consider language, ideas, all realms of cultural endeavor, to be an essential part of the ongoing human argument.

Of course, with a life based around homes in London, Paris, Berlin and Maine, I am constantly diving in and out of different languages, different cultural identities, different national nuances. Three years ago, after thirty years outside the United States, I decided to return to America and buy a house in coastal Maine. Your country is like your family - it’s the ongoing argument. And I very much wanted to be back home, and be part again of its argument, its day-to-day life. Of course, all my years outside of the States - and my ongoing constant travels - have shaped both my world-view and my fiction. The theme of flight - of running away from a life you don’t want, or the self-entrapment with which we all engage - is everywhere in my novels, as is a perspective on being an American that has, no doubt, be formed by both my own sense of national identity and by looking at my country from outside its borders for so long. It’s very good to be home... but I also like the fact that I continue to roam the planet. As an ex-girlfriend of mine once noted when we were breaking up, “It’s hard being involved with the geographic equivalent of a ping-pong ball”. To which I could only think: ‘Guilty as charged”.

The Moment: A Novel

When a mysterious box arrives in the mail, a solitary American writer haunted by the long shadows of Cold War Berlin is forced to grapple with a past - and an intense love affair - he has never discussed with another living soul. From the back cover.

Follow:
Twitter: @DouglasLKennedy 
www.facebook.com/douglaskennedybooks

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