Playland

Playland is a tough, mordantly funny, splendidly layered novel about Hollywood in the 1940s and America in the 1990s, about fame and its excesses, honor and personal betrayal, and a fifty-year search for what may or may not be the truth. At its center is Blue Tyler, a spoiled, untamed child star who disappeared from Hollywood in disgrace when she was twenty and reappeared forty-five years and eleven marriages later as a mysterious bag lady in a trailer park outside Detroit. "Everyone living or dead seemed to have an opinion about Blue Tyler," observes Jack Broderick, the screenwriter-narrator…