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A review by jaclynday
All the Stars in the Heavens by Adriana Trigiani
2.0
If you read this book without any context, it’s entertaining and often gripping (though overlong, with dialogue portions that occasionally fall flat). So, without context, you enter the story through the eyes of a former nun summarily kicked out of the convent—in a kind, Sound of Music-type way—and sent to work as a secretary for movie star Loretta Young. We’re thrown into the deep end of the Golden Age of Hollywood quickly, following Young and her secretary to the frigid Mount Baker area for the on-site filming of Call of the Wild. There, Young meets Clark Gable for the first time and they begin a flirtatious relationship. The book continues to follow this thread throughout, even though it’s never clear whether Trigiani wanted to write a novel or a biography of Young. It seems she decided to throw up her hands and write a hybrid, with neither side getting a fair shot in the end.
The reason for that is obvious with even a cursory Google search. But—but!—should you dig deeper, Trigiani’s portrayal of life-long unrequited love between Gable and Young is very fictional at best and borderline disturbing at worst. In one scene with dialogue from Gable, she describes the problems with her own book more aptly than I can:
I can’t, in good faith, give the book or Trigiani a pass on this. At the very least, her insistence on giving Young (a notoriously private figure) incredibly clear motives and pointed dialogue in terms of her feelings for Gable seems a gross miscarriage of justice. Perhaps Trigiani got some of it right (though we know for certain she got more of it wrong). But regardless, Trigiani seems to be playing with real people, emotions, and issues in a way that reads more like a fairy tale than anything else. Perhaps the stardust clouded her better judgment. Perhaps she didn’t care about appropriating real people in order to craft the most marketable version of a classic Hollywood scandal. Whatever the reason, she could have written the same book in a fictional setting with fictional characters, subjected it to a tighter editing, and done the same work more successfully.
The reason for that is obvious with even a cursory Google search. But—but!—should you dig deeper, Trigiani’s portrayal of life-long unrequited love between Gable and Young is very fictional at best and borderline disturbing at worst. In one scene with dialogue from Gable, she describes the problems with her own book more aptly than I can:
“The river is never what it seems. Now you can look at that river and see the stones on the surface, and think, The water’s shallow. I can handle it. I can make it across. I’ll just stay right on those rocks and get to the other side. And then you get out there, and pretty soon you’re up to your waist. The stone, it turns out, is an old volcanic plate that goes so deep, there’s a mountain under that river that you couldn’t know was there. There’s an undertow. The surface seems calm, but it’s only there to trick you. […] That’s the mystery. You can do everything just right, and the river moves through anyway, and it takes you with it. When you go deep, that’s where the trouble lies."
I can’t, in good faith, give the book or Trigiani a pass on this. At the very least, her insistence on giving Young (a notoriously private figure) incredibly clear motives and pointed dialogue in terms of her feelings for Gable seems a gross miscarriage of justice. Perhaps Trigiani got some of it right (though we know for certain she got more of it wrong). But regardless, Trigiani seems to be playing with real people, emotions, and issues in a way that reads more like a fairy tale than anything else. Perhaps the stardust clouded her better judgment. Perhaps she didn’t care about appropriating real people in order to craft the most marketable version of a classic Hollywood scandal. Whatever the reason, she could have written the same book in a fictional setting with fictional characters, subjected it to a tighter editing, and done the same work more successfully.