Chandler Burr on literature, Judaism and his new novel, YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU

Anne Rosenbaum leads a life of quiet Los Angeles privilege, the wife of Hollywood executive Howard Rosenbaum and mother of their seventeen-year-old son,
Sam. Years ago Anne and Howard met studying literature
at Columbia—she, the daughter of a British diplomat
from London, he a boy from an Orthodox Jewish
neighborhood in Brooklyn. Now on sleek blue California
evenings, Anne attends halogen-lit movie premieres
on the arm of her powerful husband. But her private
life is lived in the world of her garden, reading books.

When one of Howards friends, the head of a studio,
asks Anne to make a reading list, she casually agrees—
though, as a director reminds her, no one reads in
Hollywood. To her surprise, they begin calling: screenwriters; producers, from their bungalows; and agents, from their plush offices on Wilshire and Beverly. Soon Anne finds herself leading an exclusive book club for
the industry elite. Emerging gradually from her seclusion,
she guides her readers into the ideas and beauties
of Donne, Yeats, Auden, and Mamet, with her brilliant
and increasingly bold opinions.

But when a crisis of identity unexpectedly turns an anguished Howard back toward the Orthodoxy he left behind as a young man, Anne must set out to save what she values above all else: her husbands love.
At once fiercely intelligent and emotionally gripping,
You or Someone Like You confronts the fault lines
between inherited faith and personal creed, and, through
the surprising transformation of one exceptional, unforgettable woman, illuminates literatures power to change our lives.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Chandler
• Burr
• fiction
• literature
• novel
• Pygmalion
• Jewish
• Orthodox
• Judaism
• fundamentalism
• Hollywood
• Los
• Angeles
• film
• movies
• society
• change
• George
• Bernard
• Shaw
• Jews