Television: A Novel

Bojack Horseman meets Joan Didion in this smart, sly, and irresistibly stylish debut novel about a jaded movie star and the two differently conflicted women in his orbit.

Some people you meet them and you imagine this movie together. The two of you make a kind of movie and then it’s over. Other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television . . . If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.

An aging, A-list movie star lotteries off the entirety of his mega-million blockbuster salary to a member of the general viewing public before taking up with a much younger model. His non-famous best friend (and often lover) looks on impassively, while recollecting their twenty-odd years of unlikely connection. And an aspiring filmmaker, unknown to them both, labors over a script about best friends and lovers while longing for the financial freedom to make great art.

Told in their alternating, intricately linked perspectives, Television is a funny, philosophically astute novel about phenomenal luck, whether windfall or chance encounter. Like Joan Didion’s classic Play It as It Lays, but speaking to a since irrevocably changed Hollywood, it portrays a culture in crisis and the disparities in wealth, beauty, talent, gender, and youth at the heart of contemporary American life. In this glittering but strange new world, lit up by social media and streaming services—what, if not love, can be counted in your favor?

With plays in chronology, bright, nimble dialogue, and a profoundly modern style, Lauren Rothery’s debut novel is an arresting feat of literary impressionism, and marks the arrival of a significant new talent to the landscape of American fiction.