It's just about unreadable. The narrator, Joey Bertell, is a TV actor/writer/director/producer whose wonderful new series, "Sandstorm" (grabber of a title, eh?) has just been bumped from the schedule of a thinly-disguised CBS. Bertell discoveres that the reason is that "Jackie Benson" has exerted pressure on the chairman of the network to keep a show his own production company makes, "Chessgame," on the air instead.
So here's the narrator on Jackie Benson: He calls him a washed-up has-been, a senile comedian who doesn't have the sense to lie down and die, someone who's further out of it than Joe Miller's Jokebook (Oh, mama, that's biting wit), and a few four-letter words as well. He wishes Benson were present so that he could shove his "imaginary Stutz Bearcat" up his "keister."
Everyone around Joey agrees that Jackie is "the worst thing on the air," but he's an old friend of the chairman and saved the network when he switched his show over to them years earlier. And so on.
The venom is witless and flat-footed, and I doubt if it would have disturbed anyone much, though of course it's obvious that "Jackie Benson" is Jack Benny. Jack's company, J&M Productions, was indeed the one behind a show called "Checkmate" (see, "Chessgame" is a clever play on that title, who woulda thunk, right?), but whether any of the plot is rooted in anything more than the unfertile soil of the author's imagination--whether in reality Brasselle had some show he wanted to put on instead of that one--I don't know.
To give you a sense of the quality of the prose, if quality is the word I want, in the first two chapters you meet the following gentlemen: Jackie Benson, Joe Ballantine, Joey Bertell, Jonathan J. Bingham, and Bill Blackman. Do you see anything wrong with these names? Even the merest tyro of a writer is aware that one should not stamp out names on a production line and that it is permissible to use more than three initials to begin the names of one's characters.
The tone is unpleasant, egocentric, and tiresome, and the style is turgid, though I think Brasselle was trying for titillating (did you know that flying on a jet is equivalent to drug use? No? Joey says that a plane flight
...lulled me into a narcotic sleep like a combination of LSD, "pot," and a few sniffs of "Charlie."
Yes, even the archly precious little quotation marks are Brasselle's. According to the back cover of the paperback, this is the novel that had "all Hollywood walking in fear!"
I guess they were afraid someone was going to make them read it. Me, I gave up somewhere toward the end of Chapter 3. It's the dullest roman a clef I've run across. This is the book of which they said, "I couldn't pick it up!"
Oh, for heaven's sake!
