Pacific Tremors by Richard Stern

Triquarterly Books, 2001

$26.95

By Tim W. Brown

Nothing turns me off quicker than stories about the rich and powerful and their problems with
existence. The characters have cash and clout in abundance. They live in fabulous homes with
private pools, drive expensive cars, eat healthy diets, and afford the best medical care. But -- cue
mournful violins -- they’re troubled by mental illness, or they’re sensitive souls coping with [fill
in the blank], or they’re suicidal over silly things like love, as if love can’t be gotten from more
than one source. I brought this baggage with me when reading Pacific Tremors, by University of
Chicago professor Richard Stern, author of a new novel about Hollywood’s movers and shakers.

Keneret is at the end of a long career directing films. Upon meeting a striking young French
woman with a compelling personal history, he persuades her to move to Hollywood, where he
will direct a film based on her life. Pulling himself out of mothballs after a couple of previous
box office bombs, Keneret views the project as his swan song. He goes through the process he’s
gone through a dozen times before, lining up investors, a screenwriter, cinematographer, etc.
However, after he films some preliminary scenes, his major financial backer pulls the plug on the
project.

Although Keneret’s films have a spotty box office record and have always received mixed
reviews, several influential critics, including Spear, the novel’s other major character, recognize
his significance and champion his work. Spear is also up there in years, but he still leads an
active life penning books on film, attending conferences and premieres, puttering around his
Malibu home, and lunching with Keneret.

The presence of two feisty young women prevents the novel from lapsing into a story of two rich
old coots slipping into their golden years. After the film based on her life falls through, Leet, the
French woman, becomes Keneret’s protege. She assists Spear, to whom Keneret has introduced
her, in composing his autobiography. This activity leads to commissions to write additional
commemorative biographies and company histories. By book’s end Leet finds herself presiding
over a million-dollar private history and video tribute business.

Jennifer, or “Fer” for short, is extremely close to her grandfather Spear. An attorney in San
Francisco, she relies on him for moral support, especially after recession puts her out of a job.
Besides sharing a genuine affection for each other, they are allies against Spear’s daughter and
Fer’s mother whose independent streak both find problematic.

Theses four characters’ paths cross throughout the novel, while the 1992 riots, Northridge
earthquake, and Malibu fires all intrude on their lives and further complicate the problems each
is having with existence. Often it is difficult to take their plights seriously. After learning that his
film won’t be produced, Keneret responds with this ludicrous outburst: “Tomorrow everybody
here will know I’m out. Every face will look different. They’ll look through me. I’m not there
anymore. Transparent. Empty. A nothing. What that writer Ellison said blacks felt in white

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streets.” (p. 108) Stern might not intend this statement to be accepted at face value, but it still
offends on a couple of levels.

Other sections of the book are similarly over-the-top. There is a flashback in which a younger
Keneret, nominated for an Academy Award, is so nervous at the ceremony that he heads up to the
podium to accept the award after it’s announced it’s going to somebody else. This scenario has
long been a staple bit on sitcoms and comes across as trite. Leet’s story, which sets the plot in
motion, strains the mathematics of fatherhood. If the novel is set in the mid-1990s, then Leet
would’ve been born around 1970. Her father, a disgraced journalist who sided with Vichy France
during World War II and later abandoned his family out of shame, would’ve been born around
1915 to be an adult during the war. This means he was roughly 55 years old when his daughter
was born. That puts him in grandfather, not father, territory.

Fortunately Stern’s other creations, the sardonic Spear and his level-headed granddaughter,
counterbalance these excesses. Spear is much better grounded in reality than Keneret; he’s more
familiar to the reader and therefore more likeable. I imagine Spear is not unlike Stern -- a semi-
celebrity author with a self-deprecating sense of humor who feels at home at academic
conferences and on college campuses. Maybe Stern has a plucky granddaughter or a spunky grad
student whom he modeled Fer after.

Stern likewise redeems himself by leading off chapters with journalistic quotes that supply
running ironic commentary. Discussing themes related to the action in the chapters they precede,
they are usually more incisive than the narrative sections of the book:

We’re part of the Pacific Rim system. Our un- and dis-employment, our immigrants, our
maquiladorization, our Crips and Bloods, our high-school macho zombies, aren’t isolated
phenomena. They’re inextricably involved with the vaporization of two trillion dollars of
fictional capital on the Tokyo stock exchange; with the robotization of the two Koreas,
the seesawing of the two Chinas…. Connected like the winds and currents of the Pacific:
El Niño and La Niña don’t stay in their backyard. Doom here is doom there. (p. 161)

These words sound like those of Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of
Los Angeles, who believes that to find the apocalypse you need to look no further than southern
California, with its economic disparities, racial tensions, aggressive police, and turbulent natural
environment. Ultimately, I find these sentiments about Los Angeles to be more persuasive than
Stern’s depictions.

Pacific Tremors succeeds best when read as a fantasy about Hollywood’s elite. True, Stern pokes
mild fun at the declining influence and deflated egos of the novel’s two geriatric protagonists.
But he rarely challenges their unexamined assumptions about class and cultural privilege, and he
misses an excellent opportunity to explode huge deserving targets.