friendly. No one to help. No one he knows.”

From this point on, Smith’s rhetorical agenda becomes clear. Beginning with Li-Jin’s death, the novel explores the destructive effects of fame, both in the way it distorts and corrupts human relationships and in the way it feeds the popular imagination with images of “stars” who both substitute for religion and fuel resentment for those who benefit from fame’s often arbitrary largesse—its ability to cheat death through electronic substitution, magnification, and repetition. Those who are not famous live acutely conscious of fame’s effects in a bereft, secondhand world of gestures and phrases derived from movies and television. Alex-Li grows up both a worshiper of obscure screen idols and a dealer in the “tinny, cheap, reflected light”of fame through autographs. After the prologue, the novel jumps to a twenty- seven-year-old Alex-Li recovering from an extended acid trip during which he wrecked his car, hurt his long-standing relationship with his girlfriend Esther, and mysteriously received a rare signed picture of his favorite 1940’s screen idol, Kitty Alexander. As Alex-Li meanders around London, one gets an idea of his listless, rather passive lifestyle, running into Rubinfine (who has now become a rabbi), getting stoned and discussing Jewish mysticism with Adam, dealing autographs, and masturbating to pornography on his computer. He finds that he has absentmindedly booked a flight to New York for an Autographicana Fair during the time when Esther will be undergoing surgery for the installation of a new pacemaker, and much of the latter half of the novel concerns his quest to finally meet his idol—the aging screen star Kitty Alexander, who lives in semireclusion in New York.

As a send-up of the emptiness of fame, the novel succeeds handsomely, but it has difficulty getting the reader engaged with the characters. For one thing, Smith often fails to generate much suspense, preferring a whimsical sense of plotting that often as not immediately satisfies Alex-Li’s desires without much conflict. For a time, the shift to New York City energizes the novel. At the Autographicana Fair convention Alex-Li befriends Honey Richardson, an African American autograph dealer clearly modeled on the real-life prostitute who earned a moment of fame when she was caught having sex with film star Hugh Grant. Her role emphasizes the arbitrariness of celebrity, since she enjoys her fifteen minutes of fame, visits the various talk shows, works on a film deal, and then immediately drops out of the public’s attention. She realizes that her autograph is only worth something when it is surreptitiously united with the film star’s on the same sheet of paper without his knowledge. Honey helps Alex-Li track down Kitty Alexander, who proves to be a sweet old lady, and Alex-Li convinces her to fly back with him to England on the earnings of her autographs. Once there, there is a hint of conflict when Kitty realizes that her manager back in the United States, Max Krauser, had angrily announced her death to the media, thereby allowing Alex-Li to sell off her autographs in an auction at inflated prices, but she ultimately forgives Alex-Li for that as well. While Alex-Li is in New York, Joseph Klein magically replaces his wrecked car with insurance money (like Kafka, he works in an insurance firm). The long- neglected Esther reconciles with him. Even Alex-Li’s cat Grace gets along with Kitty Alexander’s dog Lucia. Even though Alex-Li repeatedly gets drunk, sloppy, and belligerent, he does not suffer any major consequences for his actions, perhaps due to the comedic nature of the novel.

In reply to the arbitrary nature of the plot, Smith consistently has her characters meditate on Jewish mysticism. Alex-Li’s mother is Jewish, and the novel has several illustrated Kabbala diagrams interspersed through the first half—the first one supplies a framework for the opening paragraphs and it includes figures such as Jimmy Stewart representing Beauty, Bette Davis representing Eternity, and John Lennon standing in for Splendor. Another ironic Kabbala appears depicting all the major figures in Elvis Presley’s life, including the man who sold Elvis his first guitar. Earlier on, when Alex-Li smokes marijuana with Adam, they meditate in front of a more serious diagram of the ten Sefirot and the twenty-two foundation letters of the Hebrew alphabet, although Alex-Li is too lost in a “marijuana fug” to feel much sense of transcendence. Even as this emphasis on Judaism provides interesting insights about the nature of the godhead and the Lenny Bruce-influenced cultural distinctions between Jewishness and goyishness, this effort at profundity can seem forced and inorganic. Occasionally, Alex-Li runs into Rubinfine and two other rabbis, who repeatedly and humorously try to force an item of furniture into the trunk of a car. The Autograph Man concludes with Alex-Li publicly praying a Kaddish for his deceased father, a means to come to terms with his death and bring the narrative to a close.

The Autograph Man becomes the sort of novel one appreciates more for its insights than for its characterization or sense of plot. As in the case of Bret Easton Ellis’s equally funny fiction, the theme of the shallowness of contemporary culture can lead to shallow characters just as a book about the hollowness of fame can seem hollow itself. Not sharing in her level of fame, the reader of The Autograph Man may have difficulty sympathizing with Smith’s disdain for it, but her depiction of what it is like to become famous is chilling. Late in the novel, Alex-Li experiences some of its effects when the autographs that he sells earn him some notoriety among his peers. As he realizes, “he could feel himself transforming, in the eyes of this audience, into a symbol of his century’s collective dream:He’ll never work again.” Even this small amount of attention gives Alex-Li a “new order of fraudulence” in his relations with others and a “new type of loneliness”—the sense that people see him with envy more as an emblem of their projected desires than as a complex individual. Given Alex- Li’s lifelong hero-worship of celebrity, this serves as the final irony of the book. Even though the storyline ends happily, one remembers Smith’s bitter take on her themes, especially the drugged, soporific nature of people’s addiction to entertainment. As Alex-Li notes, watching the passengers on the jet zoning out in front of their televisions as they cross the Atlantic, “Everything in this plane is an interface, like the windows on his computer. . . . Pretty, pretty pictures. Lovely, distracting stories we tell each other.” As he looks down the aisle, he notices “this private experience he is meant to be having is replicated as far as the eye can see.”

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic Monthly 290 (October, 2002): 143.

Booklist 99 (October 1, 2002): 276.

Esquire 138 (October, 2002): 40.

Library Journal 127 (October 15, 2002): 95.

The New York Times, September 25, 2002, p. B1.

The New York Times Book Review 107 (October 6, 2002): 13.

Publishers Weekly 249 (September 30, 2002): 47.

The Times Literary Supplement, September 27, 2002, p. 21.