Connecticut

The third novel in David Thomson's series inspired by movie genres - an enchanting yet haunting celebration of screwball romantic comedies. In 1985, with the acclaimed Suspects, and then in 1990 with the exhilarating Silver Light, David Thomson delivered unprecedented fictions in which the characters were figures from film noir and the Western. Now a trilogy is completed with Connecticut. Why Connecticut? Because that lovely, liberal state has been set aside as the resting place for every disturbed person in the nation! At first, this seems like an opportunity for meeting up with the merry ghosts of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, William Powell and Margaret Sullavan. We get glimpses of Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve. But then the wild comedy darkens as we realize that Connecticut itself is on the edge of a demented and cruel war that challenges all its inmates to keep seeing the comic side of mishap and madness. The trilogy is revealed not just as a set of dazzling stories. But a commentary on how far we have all been steered towards delightful but dangerous fantasies by the movies. Aren't we all screwball now? Is Connecticut safe to visit?

"This is a work whose power is incremental, whose shadow-America is elaborated step by step. The closest comparison I can think of are the fabulations of Steve Erickson--also obsessed with Hollywood and the myths its country makes about itself. .. . If it only tells us about Hollywood and its dreams, that's because they're our dreams too." --Strange Horizons on Suspects "A dazzling work of narrative invention." --Village Voice on Suspects"If The Biographical Dictionary of Film allows David Thomson to flex his scholarly muscles then Suspects provides the English-born author a vehicle for his passionate admiration of the stories America tells about itself." --Pop Matters on Suspects "The peculiar combination of hype and history that forms the instant myth of the West is the matrix of this engrossing fiction, in which Mr. Thomson combines real characters with those of his own invention, an amalgam as tantalizing as that in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. . . . With its rich, handsome prose, this is a book to savor." --New York Times on Silver Light"Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West. . . Artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul." --Publishers Weekly on Silver Light

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin Books, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.