I Was Howard Hughes Book

Part Great Gatsby, part This Is Spinal Tap, Steven Carter's hilarious debut paints a fictional portrait of a biographer, his notorious subject, and the illusions we hold about fame and fortune.

Howard Hughes embodied the American dream: envied by powerful men, desired by beautiful women, Hughes lived his life larger than all who surrounded him and yet died an emaciated recluse.

This makes him the perfect subject for red-hot biographer Alton Reece. Riding high on the wave of previous astonishing successes, Reece sees Hughes as more than simply a name worth the seven-figure advance he's demanding from his publisher. He finds in Hughes a kindred spirit of greatness, a man misunderstood and beaten down by jealous inferiors. But even as Reece struggles to "know" his subject, his own rapidly unraveling life keeps finding unexpected ways to intrude.

With a deft comic touch and an astounding narrative style, Steven Carter's novel creates a picture of a Hughes that might have been, a biographer that can't separate his subject from his own visions of grandeur, and a public that demands its heroes be larger than life-if only so they can be more easily torn down.

Publishers Weekly

Carter offers a cheeky look at the relationship between biographer and subject in his sly debut novel about an unconventional, egotistical author who takes on a Howard Hughes book project and finds himself identifying with his bizarre subject as his own existence begins to crumble in a disturbingly similar fashion. Aldon Reece is the biographer whose agent talks him into doing a book about Hughes, modeled after Reece's unconventional portrait of Herman Melville in Melville and the Whale, an offbeat unexpected bestseller. In his introduction, Reece offers some snide comments about being snubbed for a significant book award, then launches into his account of Hughes's life, using the same strange format he employed with the Melville bio. An odd, ponderous collection of (mostly fictional) quotes by and about Hughes is followed by an extended chapter on Hughes's relationships with the likes of Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn as well as his marriage to Jean Peters. As Reece transcribes his own interviews with earlier biographers, revelations begin to surface that betray his arrogant sense of superiority and then a Hughes-like penchant for paranoia when he is faced with setbacks. Carter does a nice job of contrasting Reece's neuroses with the over-the-top Hughes material, which focuses mostly on the early years when Hughes established himself as an aviation mogul before his various eccentricities surfaced. The author deserves credit for developing an unconventional conceit that seems quite limited on the surface, turning this into an unusual, entertaining commentary on the nature of celebrity and creating a dizzying hall-of-mirrors effect with its double portrait. (Sept. 17) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.