Rethinking Parents

Abstract

Rethinking Parents Rick Flynn (bio) Conrad in Beverly Hills. Jake Fuchs. Raw Dog Screaming Press. http://www.rawdogscreaming.com. 263 pages; cloth, $29.95; paper, $15.95. In Jake Fuchs's new novel, Conrad in Beverly Hills, Conrad Keppler is the son of Morse Keppler, once a respected novelist, now a struggling movie writer in 1950s/60s Beverly Hills. Jake Fuchs is the son of Daniel, who, as a novelist, has earned the praise of John Updike ("a magician") and of many others. After his mid-career move into screenwriting, however, he acquired a far less enviable and surely undeserved reputation as a money-seeking sellout. While Conrad in Beverly Hills is certainly fictional—there are many differences between Jake's life and career and Conrad's—one element in the Fuchs legend has migrated into the Keppler saga, the charge of sellout. Trouble is, fourteen-year-old Conrad thinks it's true and wants to restore his dad to his true vocation as a writer of what the boy calls, with limited understanding, "serious fiction." To whom is the elder Keppler selling out, and why does it upset Conrad so much? He calls them, collectively, the "Irvings," the studio kingpins his father must persuade to hire him (a need young Conrad fails to consider). Early on, at the Keppler home, we meet the Irvings sitting on a long, white couch, ten-year-old Conrad off scene in a little chair. Forty years later, Conrad recalls, Suddenly an Irving would toss an idea into the conversation, an idea for a possible film. Then Dad did the talking. He performed, in fact, put on a one-man show.... Plot, setting, characters major and minor—all came to life in his mouth because a short, ill-formed man had conceived, probably all of five minutes ago, the stunning notion of making a movie about mud wrestlers, carny hands, tragic but virtuous nightclub singers, doomed gangsters, sleazy Europeans. I used to like...I loved these shows of Dad's, imagining that he was not only a great writer but also a talented actor. But all too soon Conrad realizes what his father is really up to with those Irvings, the harried ass-kissing—always entertaining, never invited back, deliberately losing at tennis, on and on. It's disgusting, Conrad feels, but also his opportunity. Life in the Keppler home isn't pleasant. Tempers run hot as the tyrant writer-father bends the household to his will, yelling for quiet so that he can write and giving marching orders to his wife, Jane. And Conrad, at fourteen, has other problems. He is beset by guilt-provoking adolescent horniness and bedeviled by a sense of the inferiority of Jews, like himself and his mother and his anti-Semitic Jewish father. In describing the family's tension-ridden domestic life and Conrad's sexual and Jewish [End Page 14] insecurities, Fuchs both resembles and equals the Philip Roth of Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Well, what can be done about all this? Conrad has a revelation. The real problem, he concludes, is that Morse is degrading himself. It seems so obvious. Their whole life in Beverly Hills is wrong, but all Morse needs to do is what any number of critics have been telling him to do: quit the movies, become a real writer again, of "serious fiction." Then they'll be happy. The house will be happy. So loyal son Conrad launches a campaign to restore his father to his true vocation. This battle to save his father from whoring himself to the Irvings and its emotional fall-out are at the story's heart. Conrad braves ahead confident, quixotic. He sabotages a phone pitch with a major Irving by dropping in and laughing a loud and loony "Hah, Hah, Hah" before slamming down the receiver. While stiffly reading porn in producer Jerrry Breslauer's son Kenny's bedroom, he overhears his father pitching a story to Jerry. Frustrated by Morse's abasement, as Conrad considers it (and uncomfortable with his pal's open masturbation), his only out is to bloody Kenny's nose, ending another chance for work. The father gets the son's mission...