Our Town

March 30, 2015
The debut novel from McEnroe is a shocking tale of addiction and family disintegration that takes place at the margins of the entertainment industry. Dorothy and Dale are young actors who meet when they are cast in the pilot of a 1960s television show. They fall in love, marry, and have two children: Clover and Dylan. Dorothy’s career founders just as Dale’s begins to rise. Both drink and take drugs; soon jealousy and abuse have wrecked the marriage. Dale lives the life of a playboy while Dorothy slips further into addiction and obscurity, and most of the novel is concerned with her long downward slide: she takes up with a teenage boyfriend, neglects her children, moves on to harder drugs, and becomes a progressively greater embarrassment to her ex-husband and her children. Though McEnroe has a gift for crafting scenes of familial horror (such as when teenage Dylan curls up at his mother’s feet while she injects heroin), the relentlessness of Dorothy’s march from degradation to degradation is exhausting. The icy narration strives for clarity, but ultimately the novel offers a shallow analysis of self-destruction. Clover, who seems to have mostly escaped her family’s calamities, is the novel’s most realized and interesting character, but her best scenes are too late to balance the overall work. McEnroe has undeniable talent; his next book will be one to watch out for.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
If Ernest Hemingway had chosen to write about late-20th-century Hollywood while wearing Tennessee Williams' sunglasses, the result might read very much like this. McEnroe, the son of Oscar-winning actress Tatum O'Neal and tennis superstar John McEnroe, brings to his first novel a shrewd, melancholy knowledge of celebrity and its discontents. It tracks the descent of Hollywood actress Dorothy White from her charmed, promising youth to dismal, mortifying late-middle age. The Georgia-bred Dorothy is described early on as "a B-movie actress who only briefly experienced any true success, her beauty and her vanilla voice and her appetite for proper living earn[ing] her, almost, infamy." But she also wanted to be "a good woman. A good wife, and a good mother. And a good grandmother, too." As detailed as a coroner's report, but with the delicacy of a romantic elegy, the book spans decades in its description of Dorothy's best and worst impulses; her penchant for relationships with abusive men, beginning with her more successful movie-star husband, Dale; and, most poignantly, how her addictions to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs abet her physical and emotional decline. The book abounds in rich descriptions of the Southern California landscape, whether of grand Hollywood parties or of a seedy off-track betting parlor in Ventura. Those who know about McEnroe's family history will find it next-to-impossible not to be haunted while reading by the memory of his actress grandmother, Joanna Moore (1934-1997), with whom Dorothy shares several biographic details. Yet it's a measure of McEnroe's promise as a writer that his main character transcends real-life memories to become a vivid, enrapturing personality in her own right. McEnroe's writing style is felicitously hard-boiled, by turns tender and sardonic, but never less than compassionate toward an ill-starred woman who "never quite figured out how to get out of her own way." The novel often evokes the twilight graces of a classic pop ballad, each lyric evoked with care in a cocktail lounge by a soft, sultry voice etched with pain.

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May 1, 2015
Set in Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century, McEnroe's debut takes its name from the 1938 Thornton Wilder play and similarly features an omniscient narrator. This observer recounts the life of Dorothy White, a southern girl who moves to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming an actress. Dorothy's career soon takes a backseat to her romance with Dale Kelley, a matinee-idol handsome actor she meets on the set of a TV pilot. Their fairy-tale courtship leads to a marriage that is anything but happily ever after, as Dale becomes abusive, and Dorothy turns to alcohol and drugs to cope. When they finally separate, their two children become a point of contention between them, with Dale finally getting custody of both after Dorothy is arrested for drunk driving. Despite her many flaws, Dorothy never stops trying to revive her acting career, to be close to her children, to find a soulmate. Like the play it's named for, McEnroe's moving first novel stirs up nostalgia for a time gone by.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)