[In the following review, Stewart praises Get Shorty.]

If writing well is the best revenge, Elmore Leonard just merrily evened a lot of scores. Get Shorty gets Hollywood right where it lives and the joke is so funny, so infinitely tricky, so perfectly synchronized on so many levels that it's apt to make you spin.

Leonard, who has written more than 15 screenplays (8 of them produced) and has had most of his 28 novels "under option," has an eminently reasonable cause to want revenge. Hollywood doesn't simply shoot Leonard's novels, it slowly, very painfully tortures them to death.

Of course, the only authentic Hollywood novel is a comedy of manners—atrocious manners, where people are likely to eat their own hearts out with the wrong fork, or backstab each other with the wrong knife. It's this sensibility that Leonard brings to town, encased in a framework that's pure Pirandello and still pure Leonard.

But before you spend not inconsiderable money on a book, you, like Hollywood, want to know what it's about. The answer is "Don't ask."

Leonard makes it entirely impossible to answer that question. The novel has a plot, but it's not about the plot, it's all about the ways people plot. How they plot out a screenplay; how they plot their own lives, and how the two get hilariously and wackily confused.

Start with the hero, Chili Palmer. He's Leonard's prototypical good guy/bad guy—Miami loan shark and part time collector for Vegas casinos. Chili (Chapter One) is going after a gambler—a local dry cleaner who'd skipped, owing money, but a funny thing happened. The plane he was skipping on crashed in the Everglades and the guy wasn't on it. He was listed as on it, his luggage was on it, his wife called the airline and told them he was on it, and the wife got $300,000. Here's another funny thing: The guy skipped town again—this time forever—with the money, not the wife.

And here comes the topper: By page 41, Chili has trailed the guy to Hollywood and is trying to sell what actually happened in the first 40 pages as a movie idea to an out-of-luck producer named Harry Zimm, head of ZigZag Productions. And a couple of pages later, Harry's rewriting Chili's story. Rewriting Chili's life.

What happens after that becomes as lunatic and byzantine as Hollywood itself. In fact it's got an atmosphere of Boy Meets Girl meets To Die in L.A.

Harry's main investors are a couple of guys who run a limousine service plus coke operation. These are not guys to mess with but Harry's messed around. He's lost their investment playing blackjack in Vegas, and the guys are getting mad. So Harry forms an uneasy partnership with Chili to keep them off his back.

Meanwhile, Harry's got a whole other deal—a screenplay that's sure to be his ticket out of slime. And not only that, he's got some "definite interest" from the star. What he has to get now is half a million dollars, a studio's backing, a meeting with the star, and the dealers off his back.

These four quests form the heart of Get Shorty—not exactly knightly, but not exactly not. Grails, like comedy and love, are where you find them and Chili finds them all.

Some of the jokes are broadsides, and some are one-liners (the character who's "seen better film on teeth") and some are very subtle. If it's true, as William Goldman says, that "nobody knows anything," it's also true in Hollywood that everybody knows everything, and especially that everybody knows how to write.

"You asking me," the drug dealer comments indignantly, "do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That's what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn't like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes."

Another of the subtler joys of Get Shorty is watching Leonard make fun of himself. If Hollywood has told him that his heroes are occasionally too much observers—that they don't "make it happen," that they don't set the action—then here he revels in hero-as-observer, not only in the plot about Chili Goes Hollywood but also in the several scripts-within-the-plot.

Don't get me wrong, Get Shorty is not a surrealistic novel. It's a good rootin'-tootin' Elmore Leonard adventure, with the usual suspects, the locker full of money, the wheelers, the dealers, the crazies, and the girl.

But if I were rewriting it, here's what I'd do….