The Storyteller Review

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The Storyteller Review"Answer me a question: what do you know about the stars?" is the question "the storyteller" asks the main character in the midst of this first novel authored by Chris Sullivan. The character, the storyteller's playwright friend Alfredo Hunter, an emotionally and geographically peripatetic Irish Jew, and he have gathered as per custom on the deck of the guesthouse to the rear of their rented rooms in Silverlake, Los Angeles, USA.
"Not a fecking thing," he said "I just like to look. If I start to learn about the Great Bear, or Cassiopeia or anything like that my inspiration will go and I'll start to write about stars and planets and not the inspiration looking at them gives me."
Indeed the stars, the ones in the sky as opposed to the celebs slinking about Hollywood or knocking about their 90210 mansions, all of whom are absent except as sidebars to this L.A. story, provide the inspirational backdrop of this book from start to finish. Like the storyteller, himself, who provides Alfredo a large measure of support at the level of man-to-man friendship, the heavenly bodies feed The Storyteller's main character his inspiration at the level of his soul. One wonders if, on some prominent level of Mr. Sullivan's consciousness, their fellow Dubliner's famous line, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," is not informing this work. The storyteller and more so Alfredo are certainly stargazers but, if not exactly in the gutter, Alfredo at least seems compelled, either by mental illness, some kind of inner quest, or a combination of both, to wind up there.
When the storyteller initially meets him, Alfredo is living in a fleabag motel just blocks from the heart of the hubbub of Hollywood, USA. Alfredo has attempted to live the life of a homeless person but he doesn't have the stomach for it. After seemingly stalking the storyteller, they begin to converse, discover their common Irish roots and Alfredo winds up accepting the storyteller's kindness, which initially takes the form of an introduction to Betty, a fringe celebrity with a dated soap opera credit heading her resume, who is renting rooms out of her home in Silverlake, a lower middle class section of the city populated by struggling actors, writers and Latino families.
Alfredo, on the other foot from the one in the gutter, has determined not just to survive in Hollywood but, as he tells his newfound friend, "I'm here to make a killing." A few days later he's off to Betty's rented rooms where he proceeds seemingly for months on end to never pay rent but not get evicted. He immediately develops a strong dislike for the house's other resident, Patrick, a divorced unemployed actor who is on the verge of the biggest success of his life, a winning verdict on his claim for alimony from his ex-wife.
The novel takes the reader through the many trials and tribulations of Alfredo, his dramatically emotional ups and deeper downs which in his imagination include a clearly defined location for his possible suicide, his loneliness and attempts at love, his continual efforts to involve the storyteller in his adventures - which also serves as a nice literary device - and it is ultimately directed to an answer to the implied question, posed early on, of whether he will ever finish his potentially brilliant play about the final hours of the life of James Joyce.
While many of the themes of this book are serious, much of it is also hysterically funny, like the perpetually indirect interplay between Alfredo and Betty, his culinary preference and his tendency to flood the house. How could it be anything Irish or Jewish if it were not thus complex? And not at all based on the fact that Mr. Sullivan lives in Los Angeles, I also think this could be turned into a very good film in the right hands. I could easily imagine Brendan Gleeson - another Dubliner, coincidentally - in the role of Alfredo.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope Mr. Sullivan has more such works in him. The Irish, after all, seem to tend more to the body of work rather than the one-hit wonder.
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