Starlite Terrace
Starlite Terrace is a contemporary novel in four stories about the American film milieu written by Patrick Roth, published by Seagull Books in 2012.
Attracted by the glamour of show business, Rex, Moss, Gary and June had moved to the movie capital at a young age.
Their stories, mostly rendered as dialogues, revolve around love and guilt, death and redemption, existential themes, which find expression in archetypal images.
The author himself describes the narratives as fictionalized testimonies of people on the fringes of the American film and music industries, shaped and assembled into four "individuation stories".
"The Starlite Terrace narratives are part of Roth's own life story, a condensation of his forty-year experience with the film city Los Angeles, where he arrived in 1975 to study filmmaking at the University of Southern California (USC).
"Starlite Terrace" refers to an actual apartment building in Los Angeles and, at the same time, to the stepwise ascent to knowledge and a new consciousness.
This teasingly bestowed biblical title alludes to both demise and resurrection: Like Jesus on the cross, Rex, the "old king", dies a lonely, godforsaken death at the end of the narrative.
Crouching on the floor in the darkness, he encounters the numinous figure of a "Überschreiter" (transcender), a "captive liberator" who strides over him into the open and rides away, whereupon the destructive storm subsides and calm returns.
In dialogue, Moss recalls scenes of his marriage from the first kiss at a stage rehearsal of Thornton Wilders play Our Town to the abrupt end three years later.
Influenced by the drug and hippie culture of the 1960s, he wants to rebuild his guilt-ridden life and seeks forgiveness from a young actress with whom he has newly fallen in love.
As they drive by the homes of legends like Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and John Mayall, Gary describes episodes from his life.
The bright beginning as drummer with The Turtles and the marriage with a Beatles groupie were followed by his exit from the band shortly before their hit Happy Together, his divorce and a steady descent into depression:"Forty days of flood — that's what your Armenian buddy was describing.
The motif of hand-clasped burning logs alludes to the beginning of the narrative, when the Armenian Ara recalls his first film experience among friends: a 50s low budget swords-and-sandals movie, centered around the biblical Flood, tells of a man, Ur, a contemporary of Noah's, and his love for his wife.
The narrator's opening dream — about an unknown woman lying poolside as she sketches a section of the cosmos into a black book — has the effect of freeing him from a fever.
The glamorous names of studio bosses and movie gods are associated not only with abuse of power and sexual coercion, but also with death and crime.
Whether it's the radioactively contaminated filming location in the Nevada desert, which also became Wayne's undoing, the Mafia execution of Las Vegas founder and godfather Bugsy Siegel through the window of a Beverly Hills mansion, or the alleged suicide of Marilyn Monroe involving the Kennedy brothers - June is aware of the dark underbelly of the dream factory.
At the end of the evening, coinciding with her 77th birthday, June symbolically reunites the torn family ties in the courtyard of the "Starlite Terrace".
She dove upward, as if under the billowing hem of bridal gown, into the midst of the drifting figure, into the center of the light-pierced dancing cloud.
"[12] Literary scholars regard Starlite Terrace as an exemplary example of the current trend of postsecular fiction in the wake of Charles Taylor's study A Secular Age (2007), which is characterized by a new interest in spiritual content and existential experiences.
Due to its metafictional structure, Roth's neorealistic narrative exhibits postmodern experimental traits; it resorts to cinematic methods in order to intensify the impact of certain effects and to open up mythical depth dimensions.
The narrative structure is reminiscent of a layered model: "The world projected in Starlite Terrace rests on a double foundation, insofar as the archetypal world of the psyche appears beneath the external Los Angeles culture, communicating itself in [...] interwoven dreams - as a compensatory supplement, conveyed in timelessly mythical images, to the superficially trivial everyday reality, which is thus seen from a larger, transpersonal point of view.
