If Golden Age movie director Douglas Sirk had turned to writing censor-flouting fiction, he might have come up with And Introducing Dexter Gaines. The novel's actual author, Emmy-winning TV writer Mark B. Perry, has spun a deliciously frothy, unrepentantly melodramatic tale about the Old Hollywood star factory and the celluloid closet.
The novel begins in 1994, with narrator Daniel Root living in humble circumstances in San Jose, Calif. While watching TV, he learns of the death of Milford Langen, who made his name as a producer at 20th Century Fox in the 1940s and '50s. The narrative jumps back in time to the last day of 1951, when dashing 21-year-old Tyler, Tex., native Daniel, who has just moved to Los Angeles to chase stardom, is working as a waiter at Langen's New Year's Eve party. That night changes Daniel's life, but not in the way he is expecting.
And Introducing Dexter Gaines toggles between the 1950s and the 1990s as it teases the question: Why did Daniel leave Hollywood? The story, which features walk-ons by a dozen-odd Old Hollywood A-listers, could be slotted into several Golden Age movie categories: psychodrama, Grand Guignol, and, especially, weeper; there are enough tears shed in the novel to fill Mulholland Fountain, the site of one of the book's many skirmishes. Much of what happens in the novel--a reworking of Perry's debut, City of Whores--is preposterous by the measure of literary realism, but everything that happens is believable by the wonderfully pliable logic of melodrama. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer