Ryan McIlvain at the LA Review of Books:
NEAR THE END of Samantha Allen’s new novel Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet, a memoirist who’s been moonlighting as a ghostwriter confides that he isn’t really an artist anymore, or anyway not the kind who’ll likely win a National Book Award. “I’m never going to be one of those waiflike, purple prose–writing authors who gets cover blurbs like ‘delicate and masterful’ or ‘a powerful meditation on X, Y, and Z.’”
It’s hard to tell if Adam Gallagher is being falsely modest here, not least because the book’s fade-out doesn’t let us in on the success or failure of future books under his name. We do get to read excerpts from the ghosted book Adam has been quickly but passionately at work on—an autobiography of a famous Hollywood action star named Roland Rogers, who happens to be dead at the time the work is commissioned, contracted, interviewed for, drafted, revised, and published. Rogers’s book is called The Truth, and his main aim in it is to come out of the closet at last. And, on the evidence of the few pages presented to us in a playful, moving coda, I’d say Adam the ghostwriter/editor has got moves, plenty of them.
more here.
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