Time is on his side
Movie critic rewrites history in his first novel
John Kendle

In the world of Showbiz, original shock comic Lenny Bruce is still alive and kicking.

Frank Sinatra looms large, too, but this is a Sinatra who didn’t die of natural causes. He”s been killed in a plane crash, long before his actual death in 1998.

Sinatra, Bruce and Elvis Presley are the only three real people in Showbiz (ECW Press), a debut novel in which Jason Anderson creates a wonderfully satirical alternate universe and then unfurls a fast-moving comedic thriller.

Anderson’s protagonist is meek, Manhattan-based journalist Nathan Grant, a Canadian trying to break into New York’sd dog-eat-dog magazine-publishing scene.

When Nathan noses out his first big story he traipses across North America in search of long-forgotten comedian Jimmy Wynn, an impressionist and standup famous for his impersonation of U.S. president Ted Cannon, a Kennedy-style leader.

When Cannon was assassinated by Cuban-Americans in New Orleans, Wynn’s career spun into free fall. By the time Nathan begins looking for Wynn in Las Vegas, Jimmy has all but disappeared.

Creating a world and sustaining it for 330 pages was quite a task for a deadline journalist such as Anderson, best known as the movie critic for Toronto’s eye weekly. But he handles the job admirably, bringing Showbiz to a head-shaking climax in the style of Scotland’s Christopher Brookmyre or Northern Ireland’s Colin Bateman.

“The book itself was actually written pretty quickly once I got this stuff all together,” Anderson says during a quick Winnipeg stopover on his book tour. “As soon as I realized I was going to do an alternate-history-timeline sort of thing, I realized I was going to get wicked-confused real fast unless I got things sort of mapped out.

“So I worked out huge biographies of even tertiary characters. At one point I rewrote the Cuban Revolution. I wanted my book to have that kind of bedrock, even as the architecture seemed to be plummeting downhill.”

A lot certainly happens in Showbiz, and many icons are lampooned along the way. The Rat Pack, the Shaggs, Roger Corman’s B-movie canon and even modern-day SoCal punk rock resonate as Nathan seeks out Jimmy.

To those up on Kennedy lore an ephemera, Jimmy Wynn will be a familiar take on Vaughn Meader, the real-life presidential impersonator who sold a million copies of an album called The First Family before Kennedy’s 1963 assassination effectively ended his career.

“I realized that (Meader’s) story sort of tapped into interests that I had, principally with standup comedy and with various forms of performance masochism — like punk rock and magic and ventriloquism. “In a weird way, both Nathan and Jimmy are guys who have different ways of dealing with the same performing stress.

“I was conscious not to look at Vaughn Meader’s own career; I just wanted to have (his) basic trajectory in there.”

Anderson succeeds in following that arc and Nathan also becomes a character who could easily be the hero of a series as his journalism career develops.

While Anderson isn’t sure another Nathan book will happen, he is rather pleased with the reception afforded his first novel. Still, the longtime critic admits he has had to get used to reading reviews of his own work.

“It may be cliché, but I find a mixed review most valuable, because you actually have someone who obviously thought about it seriously and figured out what they liked and didn’t like and why.

“Overall, the reviews have been pretty kind,” he says.