Chandler Burr’s controversial Hollywood novel

THE HILLS HAVE EYES Burr turns his gaze on Tinseltown.

Photograph: Michael Strong

It’s a common joke that nobody reads in Hollywood. But what if literature suddenly became a trend, with industry players clamoring to get into an exclusive book club run by the wife of a major studio bigwig?

That’s the premise of Chandler Burr’s You or Someone Like You, an intriguing novel of manners about the film business and the largely Jewish tribe that runs it. The book stars Anne Rosenbaum, a middle-aged Columbia literature Ph.D. who leads a tranquil existence with her Hollywood exec husband, Howard, and their 17-year-old son, Sam. Her quiet life explodes when she finds herself leading discussions of classic books with the Hollywood elite. The club begins modestly at the request of former Universal Studios CEO Stacey Snider—one of many boldfaced names to appear in the novel—but as word spreads, it soon becomes a craze, and Anne winds up in Vanity Fair as Tinseltown’s latest guru. Meanwhile, her family life falls apart.

A longtime journalist, Burr is best known as the perfume critic for The New York Times and the author of two prominent nonfiction books on scent, but he doesn’t want to talk about any of that on a recent morning at a Starbucks near his Midtown East home. And for good reason: You or Someone Like You, his first work of fiction, has been in development for at least a decade, its ideas brewing in Burr’s head for even longer. An aspiring Hollywood player himself, he’s written seven screenplays over the years; though none have been produced, his efforts have given him an inside look at filmdom via meetings with some of the industry’s biggest power brokers. (They include heavyweight producer Brian Grazer, who so loved Burr’s 2003 book, The Emperor of Scent, about a charismatic olfactory scientist, he bought copies for Tom Hanks and several other friends.)

“I’ve lived on the periphery of Hollywood for at least 20 years,” Burr says. “I’ve observed, as a sociologist and anthropologist, the extremely strange flora and fauna that inhabit that world. It’s a wonderful setting for social commentary.”

His field work serves the novel well, with depictions of Los Angeles culture that feel spot-on. And though the name-dropping may be a gimmicky conceit, it’s a genuine thrill to read what people like Albert Brooks, to give just one of many examples, might think of Jude the Obscure. (As Burr depicts him, he’s “adamant that Hardy is saying religion just comes from interpreting misfortune as divine intervention,” while writer-producer Grant Heslov argues that “anyone with a brain could see the novel is primarily condemning social determinism and class structure.”)

The choice to give cameos to real Hollywood characters was a simple one. “I didn’t want to make them all up,” says Burr, who doesn’t know the vast majority of the people he portrays. “It was just easy to use them, and it was fun.”

While the device will likely make You or Someone Like You a must-read in film and literary circles, it’s the book’s other conceit that may prove broadly controversial: its brutal assessment of what Burr calls Judaism’s obsession with “racial purity.” According to Jewish law, only the children of Jewish mothers, not fathers, are considered Jewish—and Anne is a Gentile. So when the Rosenbaum’s son, Sam, shows up at a yeshiva on a spring-break trip to Israel, he’s forcibly ejected for not being a real Jew. The incident causes a crisis of faith for his father, who decides to embrace his religion even though he hasn’t been to temple in years. Howard ends up leaving his family—and Anne uses her newfound platform of the book club to try to win him back.

Burr had the same experience as Sam when the author visited Israel as a young man. “Every single detail about Sam is exactly as it happened to me,” he says of being kicked out of a yeshiva when he was 23. Unlike his perfume writing, the novel helped Burr ponder and work through an episode that has long stuck with him. “I’m 46 now and I remember aspects of it clear as day. It has an impact on you when you’re basically escorted out of a building and pushed into the street for being racially impure.”

It remains to be seen if Hollywood will embrace You or Someone Like You, given the novel’s spiky portrayal, but the author is already preparing for the film adaptation. “I’m 60 percent done with the treatment,” he says. He even has an actress in mind for the lead role. “Anne’s maiden name is Hammersmith, which I chose because Helen Mirren was born in Hammersmith, London.”

You or Someone Like You (Ecco, $25.99) is out Tue 9. Burr reads Wed 10.

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