Her Leading Man
Grade : D-

How I wanted to like this book! In Her Leading Man, Alice Duncan took a chance on something different. Set in Southern California in 1913, it is the story of an actress and a producer who are making a silent film. Doesn't that sound fascinating?

Martin Tafft is a producer and director. He sees film as an art form capable of transforming society for the better. It grieves him that his beloved medium is being used to make tawdry thrillers - which doesn't stop him from making An Egyptian Idyll, a somewhat tawdry thriller. Christina Mayhew is the star of the picture. She is a beautiful, intelligent, self-confident young woman who is determined to become a physician. She has even been accepted into medical school, but due to her sex was unable to obtain a scholarship. She acts in movies to save up enough money for tuition.

Christina and Martin fall in love and have an affair, but how can their love survive? He is a moral man who believes that when a man loves a woman he should marry her. But Christina doesn't want to abandon her career plans and become a wife and mother.

The parts about the filming of An Egyptian Idyll are interesting and funny. Nothing else is.

The author's writing style simply drove me crazy. The entire book is written in a verbose, flowery, roundabout way that may be intended to pastiche the writing style of the early part of the twentieth century, or it may just be the way Duncan writes. It succeeds only in draining the immediacy from whatever is being described. For instance, in this scene, Martin is kissing Christina: "In order to encourage him without saying something that might trigger his overpowering and inconvenient conscience, she said 'Mmmmmm' in a way she hoped conveyed how delicious she found his tender assault.

Passionate, no? No! Things are repeated numerous times, as though Duncan suspects that her readers have short-term memory problems and must be given lots of reminders. Worst of all, characters spend pages and pages and pages and pages engaged in internal monologue. They are incapable of having a conversation without devoting several paragraphs between each utterance to thinking and assessing and wondering. The result of all this is a book that is interminably dull.

For the first half of the book, the attraction between Martin and Christina manifests itself in unpleasant physical symptoms, and they both think that they're falling ill. "Martin couldn't understand what it was about her that caused his innards so much trouble. Maybe he was getting an ulcer." This is supposed to be funny. Maybe it would have been, if the joke had only been told once.

Good characters might have helped - we don't get them. Duncan likes to use the same few words to describe the hero and heroine, over and over. Throughout the book, Martin is startled. He is dismayed. He is befuddled. Sometimes he lapses into pained amazement. It is impossible to imagine him being decisive enough to direct a movie - I have never encountered such a completely ineffectual hero. Here is a typical Martin speech: "I-I've never met anyone like you. I've never felt this way about anyone else. If you were older . I mean, if I were younger ... I mean, if I were a different sort of ... I mean, I desire you. Honestly, I do."

Christina is faintly more interesting, a strong-willed feminist whose self-confidence contrasts nicely with Martin's wimpiness. But she tends to fling herself into tantrums for imagined slights. She's always flouncing around being offended. Also, I have to say it is impossible for me to believe that Christina would embark upon an affair without at least giving a passing thought to the possibility of pregnancy. Martin and Christina plan to have an extended affair, as though birth control were available to them - which it wasn't. For a book that gets most historical details right, Christina's "anything men can do I can do" attitude towards intercourse is a major inaccuracy.

Her Leading Man is unusual. I respect Duncan for writing about such an interesting setting and time period. The pairing of Christina and Martin is one of an alpha female and a beta male, which is unique and different, and could have worked. But the heroine is immature. The hero is a doormat. The humor is labored. The whole thing is so wordy and clunky that I thought I'd never get through it. This book's promise is not fulfilled, and I strongly advise readers to try something else...just about anything else should do.

Reviewed by Jennifer Keirans
Grade : D-
Book Type:

Sensuality: Subtle

Review Date : February 22, 2001

Publication Date: 2001

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Jennifer Keirans

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