Just Jennifer

Night Film by Marisha Passl (Random House, September 2013)

Seven years after Passl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics was named a New York Times best book of 2006, she is back with an epic novel that begins with the suicide of Amanda Cordova the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a reclusive movie producer whose movies have become underground cult classics and doesn’t let up until a disgraced journalist questions not only his sanity, but his grasp on reality.  Scott McGrath threw the gauntlet down in an interview about Stanislas Cordova, a Stanley Kubrick-esque movie maker.  Shortly after that, he finds his career in the toilet and becomes obsessed with finding Cordova and revealing all his secrets.  When Amanda is found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned building, her death is ruled a suicide, but Scott is doubtful and becomes entwined with her last few years, trying to prove that it was her upbringing that drove the child piano prodigy to her death.  Joining forces with two unlikely young people, the coat check girl at the Four Seasons who may have been the last person to see Amanda alive and a young man who knows more than he is letting on, Scott reluctantly brings his charges with him to an upstate mental facility Amanda escaped from and to the secret websites where Cordova fans post theories about the movie maker and Amanda’s death along with the underground venues where these movies are currently being screened.  The deeper Scott digs into this hypnotic, eerie world, the stranger the world he knows becomes as people disappear and recant their stories, disavowing any knowledge of or contact with Amanda or her father.  Jeopardizing his visitation with his daughter and whatever relationship he has been able to maintain with his ex-wife, Scott finds himself straddling reality, dangerously close to obsession, an obsession he realizes that began when he unknowingly saw the young woman in her now famous red coat in the Park.   Over six hundred pages may initially be off putting, but readers are quickly drawn into the narrative as they follow along with Scott in his quest to uncover the truth about Cordova.  It almost seems as if there are two separate endings, offering a “choose your own adventure” feeling,  but they come together at the very end when it looks as if Scott will get all his answers…or not.