In the latest Publishers Weekly, The Loved One is named among the top 10 Hollywood novels. The list is made up by Michael Friedman whose own Hollywood novel, Martian Dawn (2006), has just been reprinted together with two previously unpublished novels, not apparently about Hollywood. Other novels on the list include such well known titles as The Last Tycoon and The Day of the Locust. There are also a few darker horses such as Children of Light by Robert Stone.
Friedman breaks down the Hollywood novel into six sub genres, including “Brits who have had enough of our philistine ways and ersatz culture and return home to civilization” into which he fits P.G. Wodehouse’s Laughing Gas (1936) as well as The Loved One. Others in that group might have included Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Martin Amis’s Money. Amis’s book even comes with its own allusion to The Loved One–a character named Juanita del Pablo, who is featured in Friedman’s discussion.
