— in returning to his Hollywood heyday childhood — has “given us, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and his own Pandaemonium, one of the four best Hollywood novels ever written,” says Elizabeth Frank in the New York Times. Epstein’s father and uncle were the twin screenwriters Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein, who wrote Casablanca, Mr. Skeffington, Arsenic and Old Lace and many other golden era films, and in his latest book San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (Handsel, 2003), a family very similar to his own deals with — and doesn’t deal with — HUAC, death, dishonesty, mental illness, truth, and illusion against the fabled and strange background of 1950s Los Angeles.

But Frank warns readers not to expect gauzy nostalgia: “Although everywhere in the novel the California sun, ocean and flora distill a heady perfume, Epstein is no sentimentalist, and writes of swimmers in the Pacific, ‘The breakers crashed to pieces before them and rolled sizzling about their feet and ankles, like animal fat.’ … Nothing about [main character] Richard’s Hollywood jeunesse is unmitigatedly doree ”

Hear an interesting NPR interview with the author. Read the First Chapter in the NYT and another excerpt in the BU’s Partisan Review.